Home Health & Hospice Week

Telehealth becomes more cost effective.

Fuel savings may be hiding in new approaches to how your agency serves patients.

Consider these field-tested strategies:

• Scrutinize your routes.  Looking at how you schedule visits can shave quite a bit off of the miles staffers travel to serve patients--and it's further evidence that you are concerned about employees' out-of-pocket costs for travel.

"Good agencies do what they can to avoid unnecessary travel time," says Tom Boyd of Rohnert Park, CA-based consulting firm Boyd & Nicholas.

Managing travel efficiently can be trickier if you're a small agency, he allows. But it can be done.

Example: Pioneer Home Health Care started its campaign to rein in travel costs when Medicare ushered in its home health prospective payment system. The starting point was a drastic--but realistic--reduction in service area, says Pat West, Pioneer's administrator.

"We just couldn't afford the extra windshield time, traveling that extra 90 miles to the north," she says.

Some visits still take Pioneer staffers more than 100 miles each way. To keep long trips at a minimum, Pioneer routinely visits far-flung areas only on certain days, letting patients know the policy in advance.

• Revisit telehealth options. Telehealth monitoring, including video conferencing, helps Pioneer fill in the gaps between in-person visits.

"Costs for many of the monitors have come down significantly," West reports.

• Use technology wisely. Electronic charting can go a long way in reducing mileage, since nurses can simply upload information to the home office--without having to trek back to the office.