Advanced Home Health & Hospice Case Study
Overview
Advanced Home Health and Hospice Reduces Hospital Readmissions with Remote Patient Monitoring
Located in Pittsburgh, Advanced Home Health and Hospice (AHH) provides a wide variety of care services, including skilled nursing, physical and occupational therapy, speech therapy, hospice, and more. AHH utilizes advanced technology in its clinical care programs to deliver personalized care to support patients in managing chronic diseases and recovering from an illness or surgery.
Challenge
Serving communities across western Pennsylvania, including several rural communities, AHH recognized several barriers that many of its patients face when accessing health care services, including lack of transportation, increasing cost of care, and inadequate educational resources available to patients. To address these problems, AHH launched a telehealth and remote patient monitoring (RPM) program in 2019.
However, Advanced Home Health and Hospice continued to face the following challenges when deploying RPM services to patients.
- Wireless Connectivity: Poor connectivity delayed the transmission of patient data and prevented the use of virtual visits meant to provide convenience to rural patients.
- Lack of Proper Educational Resources: Without educational resources available through RPM, AHH struggled to develop disease self-management skills among its chronic care patients.
- Reduce ED visits through monitoring and early community intervention.
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Clinician Buy-in: Lacking educational and clinical support from its previous telehealth and RPM vendor, AHH experienced low buy-in among clinicians, derailing program success.
Solution
In January 2021, AHH partnered with Health Recovery Solutions (HRS) to re-launch its telehealth and RPM program. Through its partnership with HRS, Advanced Home Health and Hospice aimed to reduce care costs leveraging virtual visits, decrease hospital readmissions and adverse outcomes with real-time biometric monitoring, and support clinicians by providing advanced training and best practices for telehealth and remote patient monitoring.
AHH experienced a seamless transition to Health Recovery Solutions, including:
Enhanced wireless connectivity through HRS’ 4G wireless capabilities and SIM card offering, allowing AHH to provide virtual visits.
Increased access to condition-specific educational resources to improve patient education and strengthen disease self-management among AHH patients.
A robust onboarding process, offering technical support, marketing resources, logistics and inventory management, clinical and reimbursement consultations, and a telehealth and RPM certification program.
The ability to personalize telehealth and RPM services through condition-specific care plans and education.
The telehealth program has made me more involved in my health. By taking my vitals every day, I am working towards getting healthier, making progress, and remaining stable. I know that if my blood pressure is too high, or my oxygen is too low, my telehealth nurse will call me and make sure I am okay. When I left the hospital after having COVID-19, I was scared to be home alone, but with the telehealth program my anxiety went away knowing that a nurse was monitoring and supporting me.
Charles
AHH Patient
Of Telehealth Patients were More Involved in their Care while Using Telehealth
Hours of Staff Training
Results
When relaunching the Advanced Home Health and Hospice telehealth program, HRS provided over 100 hours of training to the AHH nursing team. HRS trainings included product demonstrations, installation and virtual visit best practices, and clinician workflow strategies.
The AHH nursing team performs an average of 10-17 virtual visits per week, using virtual visits to augment in-person visits, evaluate patients following a high-risk alert, and provide personalized education.
The use of virtual visits and regular communication with telehealth patients has significantly increased patient engagement and satisfaction. One hundred percent of telehealth patients monitored in 2021 stated they were more involved in their care while using telehealth.