The Home Centered Care Institute (HCCI), a national nonprofit that aims to educate primary care physicians about in-home care, has launched a platform to help doctors target patients in need of their services.
“We needed to understand how many home care providers there really were out there, the volume of patients they were seeing, and then, perhaps, most importantly, the degree of unmet need,” Melissa Singleton, HCCI chief learning officer, told McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse. “That is, patients who were homebound or home-limited and didn’t have access to home-based medical care. So we were looking for this baseline in order to assess how effective we were in our indirect interventions in creating greater access for patients in need.”
The result is Confer Analytics, a platform that offers market intelligence regarding patient demographics, capacity for growth, quality benchmarks, referral sources and more. The organization began working with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services around two years ago to access Medicare and Medicaid claims. It launched the platform in mid-April on a subscription basis. Users are generally from mid- to large-size practices or house systems who want to better understand the needs of their patients, Singleton said.
“We’ve had a lot of interest in it so far,” she said. “It’s been exciting.”
Origins of HCCI
HCCI dates back to 2014. Originally, it was designed to provide workforce development and train a home-based primary care workforce. While it was initially modeled after the Center to Advance Palliative Care with brick-and-mortar centers, it has since evolved to provide virtual training and consulting services, Julia Sacks, HCCI president and COO, explained to McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse.
“We primarily are teaching people how to create a sustainable practice,” she said. “And so we educate not just on clinical but practice operations as well. And [we] kind of have a vision that we’re going to end up in a world where everybody who needs a house call will be able to get one.”
Today it serves as an educational complement to the American Academy of Home Care Medicine, a membership organization. While its base has been primary care physicians, it will be turning its attention to residents and nurse practitioners to encourage a pipeline of providers. Clients include hospice and palliative care organizations that want to integrate home-based primary care.
“The home-based primary care provider is referred to kind of as the quarterback of the team,” Sacks said. “And so they’re oftentimes coordinating home health, coordinating hospice and palliative care. And we find that people get services, especially hospice, earlier when they have a home-based primary care physician or nurse practitioner.”
Filling a niche
The need for home-based primary care is only growing, Sacks and Singleton said. HCCI estimates there are 3,000 doctors performing this service. There needs to be 12,000, Sacks said. Only 15% of those who need home-based primary care are receiving it; 85% of the people who need it can’t access it.
Driving the trend is value-based care, Singleton said.
“There’s absolutely a movement to get more of these practices in a value-based contracting arrangement,” she said. “And so whether that’s Medicare Advantage or some other kind of payment model, that’s really, really important because we know that this kind of care is not sustainable in a fee-for-service volume base.”
