This week press have been catching wind to a trend of insurance companies recognizing that coordinating care outside of the hospital equates to lower hospitalizations.
- For health insurer, Geisner, paying nurses to conduct phone follow-ups with chronically ill patients reduced hospital admissions by 18% and overall medical expenses by 7 percent, according to The New York Times.
- Insurer Health Net of Arizona used a “high-intensity telephone management program” to reduce hospitalizations by 40% and save $1,000 per patient, according to American Journal of Managed Care.
Clearly phone follow-ups (also known as tele-care management) are an important element of keeping the chronically ill healthy and at home. However, for patients who can’t self-direct their care, phone follow-up has limited value – which is of interest when you consider that the top 5 percent of the population, accounts for 49 percent of health care expenditure.
That top 5 percent consists of patients who have multiple chronic conditions that are complex to treat. For these patients and their families, a hospitalization is not only costly, but also takes a profound physical and emotional toll. The much talked about phenomenon of hospital delirium affecting one in three over 70 is one of a long laundry list of factors.
For these reasons, over the last ten years SeniorBridge has been developing a model of service provision that incorporates a multidisciplinary professional team of health providers who offer care management, caregiving and care monitoring services for those with chronic complex health illnesses. The data are compelling.
In a review of SeniorBridge client records that were on service for a year, health outcomes were considerably better than those reported in the general Medicare population. SeniorBridge clients with chronic illnesses who are 65 years and older have 82% fewer hospitalizations and 92% fewer visits to the emergency room, as compared to Medicare beneficiaries with chronic illnesses Additionally, SeniorBridge clients have 46% fewer re-hospitalizations than reported in the recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. These outcomes demonstrate that there is both a quality of life and economic benefit to the high-touch approach to in-home care that is provided by a team of healthcare professionals, coordinating care with the physician and the family support system.
