Posted Wednesday, October 4, 2023
McKnight’s Home Care
By: Liza Berger
One of the most positive aspects of the home health hearing in the Senate last week was senators’ knowledge about home health. A particularly significant moment occurred when Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) questioned William Dombi, president of the National Association for Home Care & Hospice, about the lack of interoperability in the sector.
“This is very ironic because so many resources have been directed towards physicians and hospitals for interoperable health records,” Dombi responded. “Nothing was directed towards home care, yet home care actually was first out of the gate and ready to go to do healthcare with interoperable healthcare records.”
Home care, arguably, is ahead of the curve, he noted.
“We have a nurse in an individual’s home at this very moment who has point-of-care planning with her, either her phone or her iPad, with electronic connections to physicians to hospitals, to their own office,” he said. “But they don’t talk the same language.”
At least one technology company is acutely aware of this challenge.
“There is nothing more important than interoperability, and ResMed Corp. and MatrixCare is just putting all its weight behind getting this foundation set up right now so that technologies to come can be built on top of it,” Bharat Monteiro, general manager of senior living and long-term care for MatrixCare, told McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse at MatrixCare’s INSPIRE conference last week in Chicago.
Monteiro pointed out four major challenges facing long-term care. These are the staffing shortage, the change in reimbursement models including the transition from fee-for-service to value-based care, technology disruptions on the horizon such as ChatGPT, and the growing number of older adults needing care. These make the need for interoperability all the more pressing, he said.
“Interoperability has been an important buzzword in healthcare for 15, 20 years, but the reason, I think, to solve it is even far more important now than before,” he said. “As these problems converge on our industry … it is absolutely crucial that technologies are able to talk to each other and that data is able to get to where it needs to be.”
The home health sector has reason to be optimistic. When lawmakers and the commercial sector can grasp the importance of a critical industry issue like interoperability, there is most certainly progress on the horizon.
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