This article is sponsored by WellSky Home. In this Voices interview, Home Health Care News sits down with Wes Little, Chief Analytics Officer and General Manager, for WellSky Home. Wes describes his new role and how the development of WellSky is impacting data analytics and the future of home-based care.
Home Health Care News: You’ve recently taken a new role at WellSky as the general manager of the company’s home division, in addition to your role as Chief Analytics Officer. What career experiences will you most draw from, as you realize your vision in this new role?
Wes Little: I have had the great opportunity to have worked on the provider side and the technology side of home-based care. I spent several years working at a home-based care provider called Harden Healthcare in Austin, Texas, really thinking about how we could support our national network of care providers across skilled home health, skilled hospice and personal care, in addition to senior living, to be most successful in caring for patients.
I also had the opportunity, over the last eight years at WellSky, to spend thousands of hours with providers out in the field and on the phone, learning about their biggest challenges and working with a team of great technologists to support the development of new capabilities that make those organizations as successful as possible.
Understanding the needs and the challenges of home-based care providers has always been my most fruitful learning experience. We have predictive analytics solutions that serve home health, hospice and personal care providers. In my new role leading the WellSky home division, which really is a combination of those three markets, I have the opportunity to focus on what they need today, and also where they’re going as we head toward the future.
How will this dual role allow you to better innovate and transform the future of home-based care?
Little: I think the pandemic has fundamentally changed the way that we think about health care delivery. Today, home-based care is evolving at a pace we have never seen before. As we continue to see more health care delivered in the home, it’s our responsibility to support our clients with world-class solutions at an unparalleled level of partnership to strengthen their growth and make them as successful as possible.
In this new role, I can work on both the analytic side and on developing our core platforms and technology. I see all of this as an opportunity to accelerate our level of innovation and the amount of investment that we’re able to make toward serving home health providers, hospice providers, palliative care providers and personal care organizations.
Data analytics are increasingly important for providers as health care continues to shift from fee-for-service payment models to value-based care. How can in-home care providers leverage analytics to realize meaningful improvements in quality of care outcomes and staffing retention?
Little: Absolutely. To succeed in the new landscape of value-based payment models, home health and hospice providers must be confident in their ability to improve patient outcomes and then measure and demonstrate those great patient outcomes through high performance. Integrating data analytics with clinical decision-making will be the secret sauce that empowers those home health and hospice providers to enhance the patient experience, enhance the family experience and improve overall population health while reducing cost to the system as a whole.
There’s also a really important role for data and analytics to play in helping us think about how we improve the engagement and the level of satisfaction that we can bring to the caregivers in the field. By making their lives better, and making it easier for them to do the right thing for the patient, we make the entire home-based care system more effective at serving patients and populations.
Home-based care providers that can leverage these types of meaningful data insights about their performance, but then also about the market as a whole, are going to be the ones that can use data to go out and tell their story in the marketplace. They will be the ones who grow with new referral partnerships and new payer partnerships, and will overall be successful in leading their markets towards this value-based future.
Personal care is emerging more frequently as a benefit in Medicare Advantage plans. What role do data analytics play in enabling people to recover at home?
Little: On both the home health side and the personal care side, there’s a huge role to play for nonclinical elements, as we think about the best care plans for each individual. Personal care providers need meaningful, useful data to deliver care that considers each client’s unique status and risk levels. That includes population-level data, but also the ability for administrators or care managers to dive into client-level details about an individual’s risk to ensure that we’re making the best care plan decisions to improve their overall experience and outcomes.
That way, caregivers can best understand each patient’s specific needs and the best potential ways to help. Combining them with judgment is going to leverage the great care outcomes and impact the broader marketplace.
Looking at the provider side, how can home-based care providers use these insights to enhance partnerships with referral sources and maximize their relationships with payers?
Little: In today’s value-based care environment, it’s critical that agencies can effectively demonstrate their clinical strengths in order to improve relationships with those referral sources and payer partners. Actionable, data-driven insights allow providers to drive the conversation and serve more patients in need.
By using WellSky capabilities, we can understand the performance of each individual payer partnership. We can see how many patients are being served as well as each of the key clinical outcomes and we can help patients improve their overall clinical levels of function. We are then able to take this information and tell a unique story to that referral source that’s reflective of the patient’s needs, while also showing great performance in the strongest light possible.
Payers, on the other hand, are looking for the leading providers who can come out and offer them something different in terms of being able to take on risks of things like quality outcomes around hospitalizations. We think that providers who have the data are going to be able to have the power to come to that table with a differentiated story and a differentiated offering around what they can offer to payers and the members that that payer is serving.
Putting data into the hands of providers has proven to help improve patient health outcomes. What are some of the challenges providers face when utilizing data and insights to optimize clinical strengths, and how can new technologies combat some of those challenges?
Little: The biggest challenge in helping a patient get the best care possible is uniting all the data and all the knowledge that exists from all across that patient’s journey. Understanding what’s happening across all different disciplines of care and having one place where all that information lives can help a provider understand not only the history of this patient, but what they’re faced with today, which then gives them meaningful insights about what might be the best course or plan of action for this patient going forward.
Technology can be a driving force to help streamline workflows, improve staff satisfaction and translate data into specific actions that result in great outcomes. We believe that data is essential in helping providers face tremendous challenges by making their own staff more efficient and effective in caring for individual patients.
Looking forward, what do you see as the next big data analytics innovation in post-acute care?
Little: I see a huge opportunity for caregiver-level big data analytics engagement capabilities to enable post-acute care providers, which will truly build out the best teams of caregivers in their regions to be able to then go out and use those technologies I talked about earlier to provide the best care possible for each individual.
I think there’s a huge untapped opportunity to help care providers better understand their own workforces, and drive those workforces towards the best places possible in terms of engagement, retention, and overall outcomes.
Entering this year, no one knew what to expect in home-based care. What was the biggest surprise to you, and how do you think that surprise will impact the industry in 2022?
Little: I think one of the biggest surprises, and you can see it clearly in the data, is the meaningful shift that’s happened in the marketplace toward home-based care. I didn’t expect the changes that we saw during the height of the pandemic to necessarily persist as long as they have, and to actually be accelerating around the shift away from facility-based care and toward home-based care.
It’s a big opportunity for the home-based care industry, in 2022, to think about how we respond to that increasing need with better efficiency, better technology, a more engaged workforce to care for the amount of patients who will increasingly leave a hospital and come directly home. Instead of going where they might have gone two years ago to a skilled nursing facility or another sort of a long-term care facility, I see this as a trend that shows no sign of stopping.
We as an industry have a great opportunity to ensure that we’re prepared and able to prove the value that we’ve been talking to the overall health care system about for years, and 2022 will really be a great opportunity for us to do so.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WellSky is passionate about helping home-based care providers successfully increase their efficiency, grow profit, improve communication and coordinate care for patients. To find out how, visit wellsky.com.
The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact sales@agingmedia.com.
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