Can Analytics And Automated Calling Really Help Your Home Health Agency?

Our readmission reduction solution, Medalogix Touch is where it all started. It was our first solution which was conceptualized by our CEO and founder, Dan Hogan, when he owned and operated a home health agency in rural Tennessee. Like all solutions, it was created to solve a problem. 

Despite frontloading, telehealth and patient calling initiatives, some of Dan’s patients were still going back to the hospital when it could’ve been avoided. He thought that with all the patient data he had catalogged in his EMR, there must be a better way to identify patients most likelyto readmit and then deploy interventions before an avoidable readmission occurred.

He hired a team of data scientists and started working on what has become (after a lot of finetuningand industry feedback) Medalogix Touch.

With all of that in mind, we wanted to do a little refresher that addressessome of the questions we often hear from agencies interested in leveraging our Touch solution. Without further ado…

What is predictive analytics?

Predictive analytics goes by many names: data mining, machine learning, statistical modeling and data science to name a few. No matter what it is called, the process is the same:

• Use historical information…
• To discover a data pattern…
• That can predict an outcome of interest for new data.

Predictive analytics considers many complex variables simultaneously. These variables interact in unexpected combinations that the human eye alone may miss. Overall, analytics provides a new dimension of information, which helps clinicians, patients and their families make better and more efficient care decisions.

How does it work?

It starts with historical data. Medalogix has access to millions of patient records including patient history, assessment data, vitals, medications, schedules and more that provide numerous distinct measures on each patient.

Because it is historical data, patient outcomes are known. This allows us to understand data relationships between input variables and patient decline. Then, these patterns are applied to a home health agency’s specific patient data to generate predictions.

What is Medalogix Touch?

Medalogix Touch is the only home health predictive modeling solution that leverages predictive analytics to identify patients most likely to admit to the hospital and expands customized touchpoints accordingly. Touch starts by analyzing your clinical data to predict which patients are most at risk of rehospitalization. This information is delivered in a risk stratification, which highlights patients in descending order of risk. With this insight, clinicians or agency operators can understand where best to deploy appropriate resources. Further, Touch enables clinicians to act on the risk information with its built-in automated calling function that checks up on at-risk patients and alerts clinicians when a patient is in need of a personal call or visit.

What are your customers saying?

“Patients love it because they’re getting the attention they need and clinicians love it because it’s relieving them of calls and freeing them to spend their time doing what they do best—caring for patients.”

“We didn’t have the analytics in place that helped to rank these patients with higher needs, which limited our ability to measure and compare patient cohorts. With Touch, we know we’re calling the right patients. Medalogix has helped us narrow our focus and improve our productivity.”

Does it Work?

Medalogix Touch has helped home health providers across the country reduce their avoidable readmissions by a relative rate of 27-37%! In addition to reducing readmission rates, home health agencies leveraging Touch have also found success using the technology to help manage patients in bundles or value-based purchasing states.

Our readmission reduction results and Touch’s effectiveness are examined through a statistical analysis technique called propensity score matching (PSM) and then peer reviewed by Vanderbilt University data scientists. PSM is a statistical method that allows us to understand the true impact of an intervention by removing differences between the patient populations that we are measuring (treatment vs. control), similar to randomized control trials.

How can Touch help you differentiateyour agency and enhance your partnerships?

Medalogix Touch doesn’t stop after delivering analytics-driven risk rankings. It then helps you operationalize and streamline touchpoints with Interactive Voice Response calls. This process creates consistency and efficiency that frontloading alone often misses.

Additionally, Touch offers improvement and reporting dashboards, like a readmission referral summary report, that displays readmission trends for specific referrals and diagnosis groups—enabling home health providers to strengthen communication and partnerships with referral sources.

Agencies leveraging our solution may or may not also leverage telehealth. If you’re a home health agency that has success with telehealth, you can use Medalogix Touch to more efficiently and effectively deploy telehealth. If you’re a home health agency thinking about investing in telehealth, Medalogix Touch’s population health analytics solution may meet all of your objectives at a fraction of the cost.

Do you have a question we didn’t answer? Either comment below or reach out to us at danielle@medalogix.com.