Home Health Care News recently featured VNS Health on our commitment to optimizing patient care by leveraging advanced data analytics to drive continuous improvement in patient outcomes. Catherine Schaefer, associate vice president of quality assurance and performance improvement at VNS Health, emphasizes the significance of patient outcomes as a key focus area for the organization. “From the outset of care, we conduct a thorough assessment and tailor interventions to elevate patients from their baseline,” Schaefer explains. “Our monitoring process operates at both the individual patient level and the broader agency level, allowing us to aggregate and analyze data across various parameters, such as specific diagnoses, comorbidities, and hospitalization history. This comprehensive approach provides invaluable insights into our diverse patient population.”
On any given day, VNS Health has over 40,000 patients in its care and data collected from these patients, allows our clinicians to determine what interventions are necessary to improve patient outcomes. A few years ago, we identified a knowledge gap among some of our clinicians regarding OASIS questions. We found this gap thanks to alerts we have set up on an analytics platform for inconsistences found in our assessment data. According to Catherine, this discovery led to the creation of a targeted performance improvement project.
“We extracted that data,” she said. “We analyzed it. We identified this select group of clinicians, and then we conducted targeted re-training. We brought them in and we had classroom training. We had some people go out on co-visits with them, and provide coaching and more education. Because of that intervention, we were able to move our quality of care star ratings from three stars to four and a half stars.”
Home Health Care News+ subscribers can read the full article here.
