Excel Health Announces Availability of Quarterly Industry Trend Report
ATLANTA (PRWEB) March 29, 2018 -- Excel Health, the healthcare industry’s only source for current and complete outcomes data and performance analytics, announced today the availability of its quarterly Home Health & Hospice Industry Trend Report that includes data through Q3 2017. The report can be accessed by visiting: http://go.excelhealthgroup.com/q3trendreport
After making the detailed and comprehensive information available to its customers through its Market Intelligence Portal™ in early February, Excel Health released today a summary report for all post-acute providers to see high-level, state-specific insights regarding Medicare beneficiaries for both home health and hospice populations. Pulling from its proprietary solution that includes detailed market share, performance analytics and quality metrics based on 100 percent of the most recent Medicare Part A and B claims data, this summary report helps all post-acute care providers better understand specific trends in their coverage areas and more effectively align sales resources and referral networks.
Summary Report Findings
The report reveals that hospice admissions grew at a year-over-year rate of 4.6 percent between the third quarters of 2016 and 2017. While these growth rates are strong, they grew at a slower pace than the previous three quarters on a year-over-year basis. Hospice utilization rates, measured by Excel Health as the number of decedents that were under hospice care divided by the total number of decedents, grew to 48.8%, up 1.7 percentage points from the same period a year ago. These statistics indicate that more people are becoming aware of the benefits hospice can bring not only to the patient and family members, but also to the physicians who want to ensure their terminally ill patients have the best possible end-of-life care at the lowest cost.
For the home health sector, the report paints a picture of slight growth in patient admits (0.7 percent) and a stagnant home health utilization rate of approximately 1.6% of all Medicare beneficiaries. The utilization trend has hovered around this same rate or slightly lower each quarter as the total number of Medicare beneficiaries increases with more baby boomers turning 65 years old. As the Medicare population continues to balloon with younger beneficiaries, the average age of Medicare beneficiaries is declining, and as a result, proportionate demand for home health has also remained flat to slightly declining.
“As the somewhat stagnant numbers in home health utilization continue to persist, home health agencies must become trusted advisors to their referral partners to ensure the true cost-saving and quality-improvement benefits of home health are fully understood,” said Ian Juliano, CEO of Excel Health Group. “One way we see leading and innovative post-acute care providers leveraging our solution is to present comparative quality performance metrics, such as readmission rates, that directly align with their referral sources’ new value-based reimbursement models. Armed with our solution, today’s post-acute care providers have a greater opportunity to demonstrate to referral partners how they can bend the cost curve while dramatically improving the quality of care patients receive, in the most preferred care setting of choice – their homes.”
By releasing detailed insights into the pathways of patients leaving the acute and ambulatory settings as well detailed data about the physicians that serve these patients, customers who receive the full Excel Health data through the Market Intelligence Portal are able to truly identify in near real-time the opportunities for growth and operational improvements. Excel Health packages meaningful insights into an easy to use system that empowers its more than 2,000+ users to develop trusted-advisor relationships with their referral partners and discover new growth opportunities.
To access the full Q3 2017 Home Health & Hospice Industry Trend Report, please visit http://go.excelhealthgroup.com/q3trendreport To learn more about how your agency can use Excel Health to outperform your competition, visit http://www.excelhealthgroup.com and request to speak with one of our data expertsn or sign up for a free trial.
About Excel Health
Excel Health enables healthcare providers to thrive in the new paradigm of value-based care. With access to complete Medicare Part A and Part B data, refreshed quarterly with only about one quarter lag, (over 1.25 billion claims annually), Excel Health has put the most current, comprehensive, and robust medical databases in the world at your fingertips in our easy to use Home Health and Hospice portals. Our goal is for care networks to be constructed and providers selected based on care efficacy (superior outcomes) and care efficiency (reduced utilization). The potential of our suite of on-demand, cloud-based data solutions to profoundly impact healthcare and patient lives is immediately evident in client success stories. For more information, please visit: http://www.excelhealthgroup.com or to see a demonstration email us at sales(at)excelhealthgroup(dot)com.
Julie Konieczka, Excel Health Group, http://ehgtrial.excelhealthgroup.com, +1 8155601495, [email protected]
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