Definition

This metric is the percentage of the listed physician's patients who were admitted to home health services during the one year reporting period and who were treated by the physician within 3 months prior to  admission to home health.  

Usage

Home Health Utilization provides a sense of the physician's commitment to home health for treated patients. A higher home health utilization percentage is demonstrating the physician's commitment to home health.

 In general, before evaluating home health utilization, you will want to identify physicians with larger patient populations. The math says it all; a physician with 75% utilization who has only treated 20 patients will only have 15 patients admitted to home health, a physician with 20% utilization who treated 1,000 patients patients will have 200 patients in home health.  Use the range filters to find physicians with larger populations of patients.

Comparison

For any selected physician, you will want to compare home health utilization percentages to other physicians in your market. It is generally most helpful to compare physicians in the same specialty since some treatments and diagnoses are more likely to yield a similar need for home health services. It is also helpful to compare a physician's utilization to a benchmark for their specialty in general.

What to do

High(er) Utilization

If a physician has a high utilization percentage, this indicates a higher commitment to home health care. For these physicians, you will want to dig into their data on the Analyze page.

• From the Explore page, click on the physician's name
• This will open the Analyze page for the selected physician.
• Click on the "Destinations" tab
• The Home Health Destinations Table will show you where the selected physician's patients are being admitted for home care.

At this point, the distribution of patients between your agency and your competitors provides some alternatives:

• If you are serving a large portion or the majority of the selected physician's patients, good job! Maintain that relationship and expect more referrals.
• If there is a large spread of agencies receiving the selected physician's patients with no clear majority provider, this is your chance to approach the physician and propose a closer relationship. As a preferred provider, you would capture a larger number of patients who are being treated by a spread of agencies.
• If your biggest competitor has the majority share of patients, you will need to choose a strategy for engaging the physician in a discussion starting with identifying key differentiators that show the advantage to the physician of referring physicians to your agency.

Low(er) Utilization

Low utilization numbers for a physician indicate a wide open opportunity to help the physician see the value of home health care for appropriate patients. Dig up the key differentiators that show your success with the physician's patients, create a presentation, and set up a visit.

Calculation

The calculation for this metric is as follows:

From the following image, for the first physician, you can see: 404/705 X 100% = 57.30%.

 This image is from the Explore page for physicians

 The following example might simplify this further.

More Details

 The image above shows an example of a home health admission and the 3 month reference period that we check for a physician visit that would generate a "count" for the physician.

• It is important to note that there could be multiple physicians who treated the patient admitted to this home health stay during the 3 month reference period. Although we don't show this in the graphic, we would apply a "count" to any other physician for whom this metric applies.
• If the home health stay is not completed during the one year reporting period, this metric would still apply since the admission took place during the reporting period and the physician treated the patient during the 3 month reference period
• If a patient were admitted on the first day of the reporting period, we would check back 3 months into the previous quarter of data to see if the physician treated that home health patient.

 For more information, see Reporting Periods.