Home health providers’ referral rejection rates skyrocketed in 2021. Two years later, the issue does not seem to improving.
Referral rejection rates capture providers’ need to turn down new patients being discharged from the hospital or other care settings, often due to staffing constraints.
Overall, 64% of industry professionals believe that their referral rejection rates have stayed the same or worsened since last year. That’s according to a new survey from Home Health Care News and the health care workflow management company Forcura.
The survey examines the challenges that providers are facing in the current referral landscape, and how they’re responding to these issues. It gathers insights from 154 participants who identify as professionals working at home-based care organizations. More than half of the respondents surveyed hold leadership positions, such as directors, vice presidents, c-suite executives and owners.
For those surveyed, the majority of their referral sources are institutional. Specifically, 32% of respondents said they had more institutional referrals than community-based ones.
Only 17% of respondents said their organizations had an even share of community and institutional referral sources.
More than 70% of respondents reported that staff at their organization use three to five methods for receiving referrals. Phone calls, referral portals and fax were the most common referral channels for participants.
When respondents were asked to rank the importance of referral criteria — such as payer, primary diagnosis, services requested and requested start of care date — the payer type came out on top.
While communication hasn’t presented a significant challenge for organizations with referrals, 31% of respondents reported having issues around accepting referrals without enough staff in place to deliver care.
On top of these challenges, the professionals surveyed don’t believe that technology has helped alleviate the pain points their organizations are experiencing.
When it comes to technology needs, 31% of all respondents want a solution that will help them line up referrals with profitability goals, 20% are looking for something that will allow them to process all of their referrals in one place and 19% want a solution that has analytics that will aid in pinpointing referral bottlenecks.
The survey also found that over 44% of respondents say that delayed or poorly managed care transitions have had a negative effect on individuals receiving care at their organizations. Only 14% of respondents said that this had very little impact on care recipients.
The post Home Health Industry Still Not Seeing Referral Rejection Rate Improvements appeared first on Home Health Care News.
