Home care boosts employee productivity, cuts expenses

Professional home care helps businesses and employees alike. Expanded services and new technology make home care an effective solution for companies offering personal help and assistance to their employees while seeking to control health care costs.

Home care offers a wide array of services ranging from skilled nursing and therapy to personal care, meal preparation and transportation services. Services range from daily or weekly visits to around-the-clock personal or medical care, depending on individual needs.

Healing at home

Home care can reduce the length of hospital stays, which lowers health care and insurance costs while allowing the employee or family member to recuperate in the comfort of home.

In a British study, the combination of home-health care and telemedicine – which allows doctors to monitor patients from home – reduced hospital stays for some chronic respiratory patients to 5.5 days from 10 days.

In another scenario, an employee may be missing work or using personal time to care for a sick, injured or elderly family member who needs daily or weekly assistance. Home care offers respite for the employee and provides family members with needed help. This also gives the employee serving as caregiver support and peace of mind to continue to be productive at work and miss fewer days due to family issues.

An advancing industry

In recent years, home care has benefited from advances in medical and information technology, making it possible to care for clients with more acute medical conditions and providing additional supportive services in the home.

Telemonitoring enables trained medical professionals to monitor a patient’s vital signs and other important health information via phone line, Internet or pager system. This enables timely care and education, improving the patient’s health while reducing overall health care costs.

Other advances in technology enable expanded roles for home care, such as specialized wound care and specific treatments for diabetic and stroke patients. Dedicated home medical equipment and new uses for communication technology promise a significant future for care at home.

State and federal agencies are looking more to home care for help in reducing the burden on taxpayers without sacrificing services for those in need. Insurance companies utilize home care to reduce hospital stays.

Businesses that self-fund medical coverage and private individuals who pay their own medical costs see a benefit to efficient, effective care and recuperation in the comfort of home. Individuals have seen the benefits of home care and many decide to pay privately for services not covered by funding sources such as Medicare, Medicaid or insurance.

Today’s home care is more than just nursing for the elderly or a prelude to a nursing home. Trained and capable professionals utilizing ever-changing, expanded technology make home care an efficient and preferential way for individuals to live healthy and happy lives.

There’s another important bottom line in home care: Quality matters. The trend is to emphasize the results, or outcomes, of home care rather than the number of visits a home care agency makes to the home.

Consumers can determine the overall quality of a home health agency based on those outcomes. The Department of Health & Human Services publishes the outcomes of home health agencies licensed by Medicare at www.medicare.gov/HHCompare.

This information may assist patients, physicians or family members when choosing an agency to provide care.

The long-term future of health care is increasingly at home.

Karen Thomas, certified management accountant, is president of Oxford Healthcare in Springfield. She may be reached at karen.thomas@oxfordhealthcare.net. [[In-content Ad]]