What’s up everybody? It’s Steve “The Hurricane” here, with “A Drink With The Hurricane.” And today’s topic is gonna be, should I track my readmission rates? Cheers.
All right, so this is something that I have been talking about for years. And before I even get into it, I’m gonna share some information from the latest Home Care Pulse report, because the Home Care Pulse is just absolutely incredible. Make sure if you haven’t already done so, you register for the live webinar. And beyond their lives, I’m gonna be giving away prizes, worth up to $1,000 to people who are alive on that webinar. So you definitely want to make sure you’re on it live. It’s gonna be Thursday, July 23rd at 12 noon, Eastern Time, and I’m gonna be partnering up with Tyler Guthrie from Home Care Pulse. And we’re gonna talk about the best practices to add revenue to your home care business.
Because the home care business is so unique and so special, because it has three components, you have sales and marketing, which is your lead generation and conversions. You have your operations and how you run it, and how many people you need to run it and so on. And then you also have your caregivers, and your recruitment, and retention effort. So we’re gonna talk about how all three of these components come together to form a triangle, and how you can maximize, optimize your business to be as profitable as possible, so do not miss that webinar.
Now, back to this topic, and something that I’m gonna talk about in greater detail during that webinar, is the readmission rates. And the reason why it’s so important to track your readmission rates, is because that’s how healthcare works. Healthcare is all about the statistics. Who’s good at taking care of the most amount of people and has the best outcomes? Readmissions are how your hospitals, nursing homes, your el techs, your hospice, and your home health are all graded and paid, and everything else. If you haven’t heard of the Medicare five star rating, it’s based on their outcomes. Poor readmission rates, one star, two star. Good readmission rates, four star or five star, which means you’re gonna be getting money and everything else. So it all goes hand in hand. Now, why is it important for private duty to have this?
Well, the reason why it’s important to private duty to have this is because if you wanna get referrals from those places, you gotta know what your readmission data is. So you can strike up a conversation that’s intelligent, that leads you to be able to create, what I train all my clients on, an interdisciplinary team, so that you can take care of the people and keep them home and out of the hospital. Now Home Care Pulse, I love Home Care Pulse, but here let me show you this what they have on the screen here. So hang on one second. So you see right here on the screen, Home Care Pulse surveyed over 1000 locations in the United States. And 75% of those locations said yes, they are tracking readmissions. Now, this is a very high number, as most people when they come on the services with me weren’t tracking readmissions until we taught them how to do so. So I’m glad to see that number is 75% versus sent 25% orange, but I do not feel that this is an accurate representation of the entire industry. I feel that maybe it’s the reason why is cause they have a certain number of people who are doing over a million dollars in revenue. And the people who are doing over a million dollars in revenue all of them or most of them are tracking their readmission rates, so that’s why the number is so high. But regardless, I’m very happy to see this as in years past, it was less than 20%. And so this is a good thing to see.
Now going forward, look at what the readmission rate is. So when you look at all the people that they surveyed, the national average, we’ll say, is right smack here in the middle at about 3%. Which means for every hundred patients that you take on services, three of them are gonna end up going back to the hospital within 30 days of a discharge. Now, why is it so low when the national average for readmissions is around 17, 18%? Reason why private duty is so much lower is because private duty takes care of what Medicare doesn’t. And the number one cause of a readmission is not following the discharge plan properly, which means they’re not getting to their physician when they’re supposed to. They’re not taking their medication, when they’re supposed to. They’re not eating meals like they’re supposed to, or getting proper nutrition or hydration. They’re not doing their physical therapy exercises like they’re supposed to. And basically, they’re not able to get out of the house and do all the things that they’re supposed to do as part of the therapy and rehab to get back on their feet. And so as a result, although Medicare does come in and provide therapy and nursing, it doesn’t help with all of the things that I just said.
Therefore, the person weakens, they go back to the hospital, they get readmitted, and then it’s a penalty to the referral source. What we do and what we can do for you, if you haven’t had a coaching session yet, I’m been giving those away for a couple of weeks. So I’m going to say call my office or email us at info@homecaremarketing.net and ask for a coaching session. We can go over, how you can create your readmission rate, track it and then leverage it to get referrals from referral sources that you’re not getting business from. This is the hurricane way since 2012. And this is the reason why I’ve helped so many clients grow their revenue by more than a billion dollars, because this works. So if you’re not tracking your readmissions, you are missing the boat. So, track your readmissions, make sure you’re on this webinar that I’m gonna do with Home Care Pulse. And make sure that you get your free coaching session before we start doing, its $250, we charge for coaching sessions. We’re gonna stop doing it real soon because we’ve reached our quantity. But make sure you get in before we stop doing it because I wanna help you blow away the competition. So there’s the drink of the hurricane for the week. Be safe, God bless. I’ll talk to you soon.
