Overview
Concierge Leverages Telehealth, Achieves 7.7% Readmission Rate
Concierge Home Care provides personalized home healthcare services to patients across six locations in northern Florida.
Aligned with their mission of enabling the elderly population to live independently for as long as possible, Concierge Home Care effectively reduced hospital readmissions, decreased skilled nursing visits, and improved patient engagement
Challenge
Patient and caregiver engagement are critical elements to successful care management. Many of Concierge’s patients were experiencing an increased risk of readmission due to early discharges and short hospital stays. Upon discharge, the clinical team at Concierge was facing numerous challenges in ensuring their patients were receiving the comprehensive care they required.
In addition, Concierge services a mostly rural region of northern Florida, creating challenges in providing expedited care to high acuity patients. Concierge sought a solution that could meet the specific needs of their rural community while also enhancing patient education, reducing readmission and improving follow through on clinical instructions
Solution
In 2017, Concierge launched a telehealth program to address these challenges. Leveraging HRS’ patient and clinician portals enabled Concierge to remotely monitor patient symptoms, provide educational videos, and optimize staff efficiency through virtual visits. Each home care patient is evaluated for the telehealth program and for the level of telehealth support required.
For their telehealth program, Concierge offers patients a needs-based video conferencing platform consisting of three tiers. The highest acuity patients are placed on tier one, the HRS platform and receive virtual visits from a range of healthcare providers including RNs, MSWs, PTs, and OTs. In the last four months of 2019, Concierge’s clinical team performed nearly 800 virtual visits with these highacuity, tier one patients.
By providing additional touchpoints through virtual visits, we can have a more thorough baseline and establish a better rapport with the patient. It is amazing how much better our assessments and education can be once a relationship and trust are established with the patient and their family— Haley Brown
RN, CHHCM, Director of Complex Care
30-day All-cause Readmission Rate
Daily Adherence Rates
Patient Satisfaction Scores
Results
Over a four month period, Concierge achieved an average 30-day all-cause readmission rate of 7.7% among telehealth patients. Utilizing the automated alerts and text messaging capabilities of the HRS platform, Concierge’s clinical team achieved their goal of improving patient adherence, with daily adherence rates above 80% across three critical biometric indicators: blood pressure, oxygen level, and weight.
Increased clinician-patient communication, specifically through virtual visits, enabled Concierge to achieve patient satisfaction scores above 85%
Virtual Visits Performed from September - December 2019
