Overview

The goal of this exercise is to help you look at your territory by county and confirm true competitors and how they compare to your agency by admission volume trends by common territory / service area.  This activity is an essential building block to additional activities.

 This is a process that you will want to do periodically as new quarters of data are released and for different markets and lines of business. 

 As with any data analysis, it is important to use the metrics you find to ask the right questions for further investigation. If a count or performance metric is high, or low, you need to ask, why? The answer to this question will point you to other metrics that will provide additional clarity.

 In this article, we have included some content that is specific to each post-acute provider type for which a Marketscape product exists; hospice, home health, and skilled nursing. In the cases where a single image from one post-acute provider type is sufficient to represent any of the three, we have not included an image for each to save space.

The Steps

The following four steps summarize the overall process to make it easier to remember. The more detailed process is below.

• Examine the Market Share page
• Select competitors as Favorites (and your own agency.)
• Examine your favorites on the Explore page to determine your competitive strengths
• Create a summary document

Examine the Market Share Page

Select a Market

We need to populate the Market Share table with your local market.

 Click on Reports in the left navigation. You can do this from anywhere in Marketscape.

 Some user roles do not provide access to the Reports page. If you are unable to see the reports page and think you would benefit from this process, please make contact with Trella Health Support at Support@TrellaHealth.com

 At the top of the page, click on the Market Share tab.

 All available reports are listed in the tabs across the top of the Reports page.

 Choose County in the County/State selector.

 Choose your state from the available markets.

 Finally, select your county.

Examine the top table - County Totals

This table provides counts of patients who reside in your selected county broken out by a few different categories and trended across 8 quarters.

What to look for

• Look at the number of Medicare Patients as the opportunity in each county; these are the enrolled Medicare Beneficiaries who physically live in this county.
• Look for trends (are Medicare patients increasing or decreasing over the past two years?)
• Examine the trend of patients vs the trend of post-acute admissions (Hospice only).
• What are the right questions to ask? Example: Compare the trend of overall patients to the trend of home health admissions. In general, if the overall patient population is increasing over time, but the home health admissions are steady or declining, this could indicate a need for increased education on the value of post-acute care.

Home Health

In Marketscape for Home Health, this table includes quarterly metrics for three patient populations:

• All Medicare Patients - Counts in this row are distinct patients from all Medicare claims submitted for patients living in your selected county during the listed quarter (or four quarters).
• Home Health Total - These counts are distinct patients from all home health Medicare claims submitted for patients living in your selected county during the listed quarter (or four quarters).
• Mortalities - This is the count of Medicare patients from the selected county who died during the listed quarter.

 Although the word, "total" appears in the table title and row header, it is better to think of these metrics as individual counts; we did not add anything together to get a total.

Hospice

 This table in Marketscape for hospice has two metrics for hospice patients that provide different views of the hospice patient population.

 The All Medicare Patients and Mortalities are the same as the home health table. (See above.)

• Distinct Patient Count - These counts are distinct patients from all hospice Medicare claims submitted for patients living in your selected county during the listed quarter (or four quarters).
• Hospice Admissions - Instead of counting hospice patients, this is the count of hospice admission claims submitted for patients living in your selected county during the listed quarter (or four quarters).

Skilled Nursing

  The All Medicare Patients and Mortalities are the same as the home health table. (See above.)

• Skilled Nursing Admissions - Instead of counting SNF patients, this is the count of SNF admission claims submitted for patients living in your selected county during the listed quarter (or four quarters).

Connecting the Top and Bottom Tables

The top table contains counts of patients (or admits) per quarter for the selected county. The bottom table breaks down those patient populations by the post-acute agencies who admitted the patients. For example, in 2019 - Quarter 4, there were 3016 patients admitted in our selected county. In the bottom table, in the matching column, we can identify the post-acute agencies along with the admission counts and the percent of all patients admitted to all agencies.

Examine the bottom table - Market Share: County

What to do

•  Find your agency and your competitors. Click on the heart  to identify those entries as favorites.  
• Look for trends for your agency and competitors. Which agencies are trending up and which are trending down?
• What are the right questions to ask? See Comparing Growth, below.

  Now pick another county you serve and follow the same process. Or, proceed to the final step...

Comparing Growth

The Market Share: County table shows the percent change of two metrics over time, patient counts (blue) and Market Share. The numbers and percentages that are used to calculate the change are shown in the four quarterly columns. The change over the most recent four quarters is indicated in the last two columns.

 The ideal is to have positive percentages in both columns, % Change Admits, and Market Share Change. It is important to look at both. In a diminishing market (overall, fewer patients), it is possible to have an increasing share of the market while admitting fewer patients.

  click on the image above to expand it to full size.

Agency comparison - Explore page

Populate the table with your favorites

Now that you have identified your competitors, compare your list of agencies to identify your competitive advantage.

 For this exercise,  on the Explore page, click on the  and remove the quarterly counts from the table, along with any other columns you don't need to see. You can also drag any column header to the left or right and re-arrange as you want.

 Click on Explore in the left navigation. You can do this from anywhere in Marketscape.

 Some user roles do not provide access to the Explore page. If you are unable to see the reports page and think you would benefit from this process, please make contact with Trella Health Support at Support@TrellaHealth.com

 Choose your agency provider type - Click on Hospice, (shown) or Home Health to see the providers you have set as favorites.

 Clear filters - click the Clear Filters button. This will allow you to see all agencies together in the table with no limits.

 Use the toggle to turn on the Favorites filter.

 The Explore table will now include only your selected favorites.

Find your competitive advantage

 At this point you are looking for metrics that show your competitive advantage, for example, lower readmission rate or lower hospitalization rate.

 You can add/remove columns and/or re-arrange them to bring the most relevant metrics together.

Export or print the table to help in your creation of a document that summarizes and conveys your strengths.