Case Study: Two Agencies Report Positive Telehealth Outcomes

Two Home Care Agencies Report Telehealth Results
Home telehealth vendor American TeleCare, Inc. reports that systems like the ones it provides can bring reductions of 65 percent or more in emergency room and inpatient hospital utilization, consistent with those reported in the research literature.

According to ATI chariman and CEO Randy Moore, M.D., M.B.A., telehealth technology allows home care agencies to "...implement systems of care that establish and maintain ongoing monitoring and constant care of selected sets of patients at home, timely detection of potential acute events, and prompt intervention with the requisite knowledge and skill to attain positive clinical and financial outcomes."

Two brief, real-life examples that lead Dr. Moore to made this statement come to us this week from New Mexico and Colorado:

Centura Health at Home – Colorado’s largest family of hospitals and healthcare services and one of the state’s largest private employers, Centura operates 12 hospitals and seven senior residences and provides home care and hospice services through Centura Health at Home, their home care division. They utilize ATI solutions to link care teams to Medicare patients with congestive heart failure who are home care eligible. Centura’s adoption of the care team model includes having a nurse on call 24/7. They achieved success in eliminating emergency room use and attained a 95 percent reduction in hospital costs and a net 73 percent decrease in the overall costs of care.

Presbyterian Healthcare Services – Part of a not-for-profit system of eight hospitals, a health plan and a growing medical group in New Mexico, Presbyterian Home Healthcare adopted a disease management program for congestive heart failure patients and reduced the inpatient readmission rate from 30 percent to 11 percent. Presbyterian Home Healthcare then identified the 310 highest complexity patients who continued to have readmissions under disease management and enrolled them into a telehealth-supported care team program. Over two years there were only three admissions for this patient group, yielding a readmission rate of less than one percent.