CNSG Reaches out to NatureCoast Long-Term Care Facilities..

Yes CNSG can also handle IT Support for Long-Term Care Facilities! Here is some nationwide news from govhealthit.com to show that EMR money is also available for these facilities!

Long-term care reaches for health IT
By Heather Hayes
Mar 02, 2009
Nursing homes, retirement communities fight for a bigger share of the health IT dollar
Nursing homes and other long-term care facilities always seem to be last on the list of federal and state investment priorities. Health IT is regularly pitted against other vital medical products and services, such as pharmaceutical or staffing, in annual budget battles.
But that hasn’t kept long-term care advocates from pushing to fund health IT for their treatment centers, even as the pressure to cut costs intensifies.
In fact, some federal policymakers think IT investment serves the interest of both budget hawks and nursing doves.
“The focus on health IT has often been on hospitals and physicians, but adoption is happening in nursing homes and, to a lesser extent, assisted living facilities,” says Jennie Harvell, senior policy analyst with the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) at the Department of Health and Human Services. “Health IT holds real potential for improving long-term care and cutting costs and we’re seeing that demonstrated.”
Harvell estimates that 90 percent of nursing homes are using IT to support administrative activities. In large part, she says, that’s because of a federal mandate – and funding incentive—that requires long-term care centers to transmit certain health and functional status assessment paperwork electronically.
But anecdotal evidence and some local surveys suggest that an increasing number of nursing homes and assisted living facilities are beginning to use health IT for more advanced purposes: to support clinical processes, including patient charting, medication ordering and record-keeping.
One facility, Erickson Retirement Communities, which operates nursing homes and assisted living facilities for 23,000 seniors in eight states, has taken a full-strength approach to high-tech and long-term care.
Dr. William Russell, vice president of clinical informatics for Erickson, and a team of 30 technology specialists have launched an electronic medical record system that has led to improved clinical workflow and data availability for clinical decision support, analytics and quality reporting. The group also has built interfaces for sharing data with local hospitals and providers.
“We’re trying to work on every level to make things better,” Russell said.
When asked if it has paid off, Russell is circumspect. “We’re really at the edge of the value proposition,” he says. “In other words, we’re not seeing a tremendous return on investment for every single thing that we do right now. Instead, we are seeing a roadmap to the future.”
Investing for the Future
For the rest of the long-term care industry to get on the same path, advocates say more public funding is sorely needed. “You really can’t expect a mom-and-pop nursing home or even a small nursing home chain to be able to invest the millions of dollars a year it can take to create a robust IT enterprise,” Russell says.
If any healthcare sector seems tailor-made for more health IT, however, it is long-term senior care.
Its residents typically have multiple disabling chronic illnesses, and take several prescription medications. They are normally treated by a small army of healthcare professionals in myriad care settings. Patients are often shuttled to hospitals, physical therapist offices and other specialists, but frequently arrive without their medical charts or even the most rudimentary health history. And the care, reimbursement and administrative processes are often manual, outdated and fraught with inefficiencies.
“In my opinion, people who require long-term care services are almost poster children for why health IT is so critical,” says Harvell. “They are really the persons who can best demonstrate the value of health IT.”
The demand for long-term care is growing at an unprecedented rate. According to National Health Expenditures data, 1.5 million patients were cared for by 17,000 skilled nursing facilities in 2006, while another 825,000 seniors were residents at assisted living facilities.
But those numbers are expected to skyrocket as the baby boom generation ages. According to Census figures, the population of those 65 and over will grow 40 percent between 2010 and 2030. Meanwhile, the expense of caring for long-term care patients is expected to jump from $177.6 billion in 2006 to $336.5 billion in 2017, with Medicaid and Medicare expected to foot nearly two-thirds of the bill.
Health IT, observers say, can not only help cut these costs significantly, but also provide better clinical care and outcomes even as the number of patients increases. Among the expected benefits: improved care coordination, resulting in less test duplication and medical errors; a decrease in hospital admissions and re-admissions; more informed medication decision-making; and increased patient safety and quality of life.
“The bottom line is that [health IT] will support much-needed quality and continuity of care improvements,” says Harvell.
No EHR, No Money
Nursing homes and assisted living facilities that have invested in health IT have sometimes experienced unexpected advantages. Gary Kelso, president and chairman of Mission Health Services, which in 2008, launched an EMR at its five skilled nursing and intermediate care facilities in Utah and is now completely paperless, says the technology enables his staff to improve the documentation of the services it provides.
As a result, he projects that he’ll be able to increase his Medicaid reimbursement by $300,000 a year.
“We were doing the work already, we were providing the care and doing what we were supposed to do as a nursing caregiver, but if it’s not documented, you don’t get paid for it,” he says. “The EMR provides a platform that makes the staff document [services.] If they don’t document a service that’s in the care plan, the system sends a notification.”
Erickson has been able to reduce the number of falls that residents take by using analytics and decision support tools. For instance, the tools can monitor a patient’s reaction to medications and other treatment types and then reset the dosage of drugs that might affect balance or lucidity. The facilities also have achieved 100 percent compliance with its dose reduction documentation and better compliance with charge coding.
Mark Pavlovich, former chairman of the American Health Care Association’s Health IT Committee, says an important benefit health IT offers nursing home staff and patients is a faster, less frustrating referral system. Today, when a hospital wants to place a patient in the best post-acute care setting, they can spend hours on the phone and faxing placement requests.
With a good information exchange network, Pavlovich says, “a nursing facility could sift through all those referrals and pick the ones that they believe they could help the most and then quickly tell discharge planners at the hospitals, ‘We can take these four patients, but not those five.’ Then they’ll be able to focus their attention on the remaining five patients and get them placed more quickly.”
But for all the benefits, wiring nursing homes and assisted living facilities will be challenging. For one thing, long-term care facilities are fraught with cultural problems involving aging employees. Many prefer paper (most don’t even use a computer in clinical care settings), so training will be necessary, both for staff and administrators. Access also is a hurdle as many nursing homes are located in rural areas that still lack broadband connections. And funding for health IT in long-term care facilities remains limited.
However, progress is being made. Russell says long-term care facilities need to do their part—however small—to begin to prepare for the future.
“People need to go ahead and make a commitment, choose an application carefully, implement it and get their core users to adopt it and get comfortable with its functionality,” he says. “Because the market is going to be coming to long-term care and assisted living facilities with information exchange opportunities. It’s important to be as ready as possible.”
About the Author
Heather Hayes is a freelance writer based in Clifford, Va.