The Home Health Care Wire
Your source for CareVoyant and industry news. January 25, 2023
CareVoyant Ranked as Easiest to Do Business With in Private Duty Home Care on G2.com
Winter 2023 rankings of home healthcare software providers are out on G2.com. CareVoyant has been named again as a Leader, High Performer, and Easiest to Do Business With across Home Care Software Categories. CareVoyant has again been listed under ‘Users Love Us’ Category.
Technology has a significant role in improving the effectiveness of agency operations. By trusting in a leading home care software such as CareVoyant Home Care Software, agencies can effectively manage their employees and their time delivering care. With the rise of hospital-at-home and SNF-at-home care delivery models and the increasing relevance of telehealth, the choice of a scalable and configurable homecare software that can address the needs of nurses, operations managers, patients, and their families, becomes crucial.
Agencies should leverage technology and software platforms to do more with less and improve operation efficiency. An integrated home care software platform that can handle multiple services and payers will help agencies to manage their operations efficiently and overcome the challenges posed by the labor shortage, wage increases, and reimbursement cuts.
This blog will discuss the benefits of an integrated Home Care Software Platform for an agency with multiple services and payers.
Home Healthcare Industry News
New Report: Home Health Serves an Older, Sicker, Poorer Patient Population
The 2022 Home Care Chartbook, recently released by Research Institute for Home Care (RIHC), offers a detailed overview of the home health landscape.
According to the Chartbook, compared to the Medicare population as a whole:
Home health patients are older. 28% of all Medicare home health users are over the age of 85, compared to 10.7% of all Medicare beneficiaries who are this old.
Home health patients are sicker. 45% of all Medicare home health users have five or more chronic conditions, 17.3% have four chronic conditions, 13.8% have three chronic conditions and 23.9% have between zero and two chronic conditions. By comparison, just 22.8% of all Medicare beneficiaries have five or more chronic conditions.
Home health patients are poorer. Nearly half (49.5%) of all Medicare home health patients have incomes of less than $25,000 per year. This is a marked difference from the Medicare population at large, where 67.4% of all patients have incomes of more than $25,000 per year.
HIPAA Updates and HIPAA Changes in 2023
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act was signed into law in 1996 and while there have been some significant HIPAA updates over the last two decades, the last set of major HIPAA updates occurred in 2013 with the introduction of the HIPAA Omnibus Final Rule. Updates to HIPAA are long overdue but steps were finally made to update HIPAA in December 2020, when the HHS issued a notice of Proposed Rulemaking that detailed several proposed changes to the HIPAA Privacy Rule, and a Final Rule is now due which will likely see those HIPAA changes implemented in 2023. There has also been a proposed update to align the 42 CFR Part 2 – Confidentiality Of Substance Use Disorder Patient Records (Part 2) regulations more closely with HIPAA, with those Part 2 and HIPAA changes expected to be signed into law in 2023.
Job growth strong in home health care services
Home health care services continued to show strong growth in December, adding 10,800 jobs over the month.
The new figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) noted more than 1.60 million employed in home health care services, compared to 1.53 million in December 2021.
Overall, employment in health care rose by 54,700. Job growth in health care averaged 49,000 per month in 2022, considerably above the 2021 average monthly gain of 9,000.
ABOUT CAREVOYANT
CareVoyant is a leading provider of cloud-based integrated enterprise-scale home health care software that can support all home-based services under ONE Software, ONE Patient, and ONE Employee, making it a Single System of Record. We support all home based services, including Home Care, Private Duty Nursing, Private Duty Non-Medical, Home and Community Based Services (HCBS), Home Health, Pediatric Home Care, and Outpatient Therapy at Home.
CareVoyant functions – Intake, Authorization Management, Scheduling, Clinical with Mobile options, eMAR/eTAR, Electronic Visit Verification (EVV), Billing/AR, Secure Messaging, Notification, Reporting, and Dashboards – streamline workflow, meet regulatory requirements, improve quality of care, optimize reimbursement, improve operational efficiency and agency bottom line.
For more information, please visit CareVoyant.com or call us at 1-888-463-6797.