In 2011, approximately 3.4 million Medicare beneficiaries received home healthcare and the program spent about 18.4 billion on home health services. Today, payments are in decline and more cuts are on the horizon. Meanwhile the population is getting older, sicker, and demanding more and more complex services. The result is that there is a continued shift toward more skilled nursing and therapy services in the home.
To help meet these needs, the Visiting Nurse Associations of America (VNAA) supports, promotes, and advances nonprofit providers of high quality home health, hospice, and palliative care.
VNAA recently published the brief “VNAA Blueprint for Excellence” a resource to help improve quality and workforce training. The brief discusses how care can be delivered in the home environment and be used by home health organizations to promote quality in home health practice and care transitions. This can be a valuable resource for payers, policymakers, researchers, and others with a stake in improving care transitions.
The VNAA Best Practices Work Group, led by Margaret “Peg” Terry, Vice President of Quality and Innovation, oversaw the development of the VNAA Blueprint. The brief includes four learning modules covering ten topics and is built to grow. Some of the topics include frontloading, pneumonia vaccine, M.D. appointment scheduling, and critical interventions in the first and second visits.
To help the community of health professionals better understand what went into developing the brief, the VNAA produced additional information in the new issue brief “Safe Intersections: VNAA Blueprint for Excellence”. The brief contains information on how to smooth care transitions by including best practices and resources for home health.
The new issue brief describes how VNAA acting as the guardian at the intersection between acute care and primary care is able to bring a critical perspective to healthcare delivery. VNAA members are uniquely suited to improve transitions in ways that leads to better outcomes, lower costs, and enhanced patient experience.
For more information, go to www.unaablueprint.org or go to www.VNAA.org.