Home Health Agencies: Your Biggest Concerns About Digital Care Answered

Digital care offers significant benefits for home health agencies and is continuing to grow in use and popularity. It empowers patients to actively participate in their own care, facilitates personalized exercise routines, and enables ongoing monitoring and support from healthcare providers. By doing so, digital care helps agencies better manage high-risk patients, reduce ED and acute care visits, improve overall patient satisfaction and outcomes, and optimize costs and reimbursements.

At the same time, digital care can feel confusing to navigate and raise many questions. In this article, we address some of the most common concerns we’ve heard from home health agencies about digital care.

Will digital care burden my already busy clinicians?

It’s true that staff are sometimes so overwhelmed that adding another new process or task—even something that will ultimately save them time—can be met with resistance. But in fact, digital care can ease staff burnout once clinicians get past the adoption hump. To facilitate this process, you can improve buy-in by helping your providers understand how digital care will benefit them—and everyone. Key benefits of digital care for clinicians include:

• The ability to quickly and easily assign home exercises to patients.
• Easier patient management with virtual triaging.
• The ability to stay better connected with patients between in-person visits, improving rapport and quality of care.
• Better insight into patient progress and status.

Will digital care really benefit my patients?

Implementing digital care is a highly effective strategy for improving home health patient engagement, satisfaction, and outcomes. Here’s how:

In a home health setting where physical therapist visits occur several times a week, gaining more visibility into how patients are doing between visits can significantly improve engagement and outcomes. Digital care tools such as home exercise programs, telehealth, remote monitoring, and two-way messaging allow patients to ask questions as they come up and allow providers to check in with them on a regular basis and intervene before potential problems get worse.

Many high-risk patients, such as those with chronic diseases like COPD, heart failure, and diabetes, don’t have the skills or knowledge they need to effectively manage their condition. Online patient education helps patients manage their disease and even slow its progression by providing engaging, easy-to-understand information that is easy to access.

Digital care solutions enhance patient satisfaction in home health by providing convenient access to care, improving communication and engagement, delivering personalized care and education, enabling remote monitoring and timely intervention, promoting patient empowerment and independence, and ultimately leading to improved care outcomes.

Some of my patients are older. Will they have a hard time figuring out new technologies?

Older adults are far more tech-savvy than they are often given credit for. In fact, 75 percent of adults aged 65 and older use smartphones, while 94 percent of adults ages 50 and up text, 88 percent use email, and 67 percent use video chat.^1,2 Even though older adults are increasingly online and using smart devices in their daily lives, many are being excluded from digital care due to a misconception that they won’t be able to access, relate to, or benefit from it.

Yet technology use in older adults is associated with better self-rated health, higher subjective well-being, lower depression, reduced loneliness, and improved social connections.^3,4,5 Access to digital care tools in particular can also result in benefits such as:

• Improved outcomes due to easier access to care, especially for patients who aren’t as mobile.
• Better patient rapport due to the ability for clinicians and patients to communicate more frequently between visits.
• Higher patient satisfaction due to a more convenient care experience and greater autonomy.

Will implementing a digital care program be more trouble than it’s worth?

When done right, digital patient care benefits everyone and delivers a strong ROI. It gives clinicians the ability to reach out to patients who are struggling, answer their questions, and check in via phone or telehealth. This approach is the new standard of care, which more and more patients now want and expect. It’s proven to help patients get better and increase satisfaction—the two primary goals of rehabilitative care—as well as improve patient retention and therapy completion, all of which lead to more revenue.

Will digital care keep my patients’ information secure?

Because healthcare organizations handle sensitive patient information and must comply with regulations such as HIPAA, data security and privacy are top concerns. It’s important to do your research when evaluating digital care solutions to ensure that they are certified by HITRUST, which demonstrates that they meet or exceed key regulatory and industry-defined requirements for HIPAA, HITECH, and the protection of PHI.

The HITRUST Alliance develops, maintains, and provides access to the HITRUST CSF^®, which has become the most widely-adopted security framework in the U.S. healthcare industry. With the strongest threat management and mitigation practices, military grade data encryption, and 24/7 monitoring, the MedBridge platform is HITRUST-certified, demonstrating our commitment to the safety of your patient data.

Conclusion

Not all digital care tools are right for every home health agency. But with the variety of options available now, most agencies can benefit from implementing solutions that align well with their key needs, objectives, and goals. Research indicates that digital care is here to stay, and by leveraging high-quality, trustworthy solutions that solve your organization’s specific challenges, your agency, clinicians, and patients can experience significant benefits.

Engage Your Patients and Improve Outcomes with MedBridge

MedBridge offers best-in-class digital care solutions that integrate patient engagement and education with innovative technology. We offer:

Home Exercise Program Builder
Engage patients with an easily accessible and customizable library with thousands of video exercises developed by industry professionals.

Patient Education
Help patients understand their diagnosis and rehabilitation plan with engaging education to encourage them to effectively manage their care plan.

Telehealth Virtual Visits
Supplement or replace in-person visits with effective, user-friendly telehealth tools.

MedBridge GO Mobile App and MedBridge Patient Portal
Make access to care easy and convenient by giving patients the choice of participating in their care program via app or online.

Patient Adherence Tracking
Support behavior change with improved communication and deeper understanding of your patients’ actions.

References

1. Favero, M. (2022). Share of those 65 and older who are tech users has grown in the past decade. Pew Research Center.
2. Kakulla, B. (2021). Older adults embrace tech for entertainment and day-to-day living. AARP.
3. Chopik, W. J. (2019). The benefits of social technology use among older adults are mediated by reduced loneliness. Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, 19(9), 551–6.
4. Czaja, S. J., Boot, W. R., Charness, N., Rogers, W. A, & Sharit, J. (2018). Improving social support for older adults through technology: Findings from the PRISM randomized controlled trial. Gerontologist, 58(3), 467–477.
5. Haase, K. R., Cosco, T., Kervin, L., Riadi, I., & O’Connell, M, E. (2021). Older adults’ experiences with using technology for socialization during the COVID-19 pandemic: Cross-sectional survey study. JMIR Aging, 4(2), e28010.