Jess Chew, Vice President, Marketing
With more than 10 years’ experience in healthcare marketing, Jessica not only leads our marketing team but is also a passionate advocate and frequent user of our marketing intelligence solutions. After graduating from the University of Georgia with a bachelor’s in journalism, Jessica got her start in marketing at Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in America. She thought this entry-level job was the first step on the road to a career as an investigative reporter — but immediately became hooked on marketing. At Trella Health, she’s able to do all the things she loved about journalism — digging for information and insights, helping people share their stories — and she’s also able to make a meaningful difference in the way post-acute care is provided.
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Targeting Strategy Video Series: Underutilization
By Jess Chew | December 15, 2020
For post-acute care organizations, growing and strengthening your referral network is the key to operational success. In our latest blog series, the Trella team will be diving into the most common, most effective, and most efficient targeting strategies you can use to improve your referral relationships and grow your post-acute care organization – through both admissions and revenue. In this short video, find out the top tips for targeting physicians who are underutilizing post-acute care.
What is Underutilization?
Physicians who are underutilizing post-acute care have a large share of patients they’ve recently seen or treated who haven’t leveraged home health, hospice, or skilled nursing care, despite being eligible. While this sometimes happens because their patients aren’t adhering to instructions, many times it’s because patients have not been identified during the care cycle for these services
Based on the most recent claims data, only 50.6% of Medicare Fee-for-Service patients were discharged from an inpatient stay with post-acute care instructions nationwide. This opens the door for many post-acute care organizations to show how they can significantly improve patient outcomes, reduce Medicare costs, increase their admissions and revenue while lowering patient readmissions to inpatient stays.
Why is it Impactful?
The lack of quality post-acute care for hospice patients can cause them undue pain and stress in their final stages of life. Hospitalization in a patient’s last 30 days of life or readmission to an inpatient stay, ER and observation visits increase Medicare costs while significantly impacting the patient’s overall quality of life.
Our recent Hospice End-of-Life Study showed that referring eligible patients to hospice care earlier will improve quality of life and increase comfort measures for patients by reducing ER and inpatient visits. Additionally, hospice care provides patients and their families with other benefits, including psychosocial and spiritual support for the family during this critical time.
For home health-eligible patients, receiving proper post-acute care can significantly improve patient outcomes, manage chronic conditions while reducing hospitalizations and inpatient readmissions. When prioritized and executed well, post-acute care can be an essential part of a patient’s recovery process. Identifying the physicians in your market who have patients that require post-acute care services is the first step towards that goal.
Want to know more?
Visit our Resource Center to find all of our targeting strategy content. Or request a demo to see Marketscape from Trella Health in action!
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