Catching Zzz's on Your Own Terms

Neenah, Wis.-based ThedaCare At Home has set its business apart and is navigating Medicare cuts by promoting products without HCPCS codes and eliminating unnecessary home visits.

ThedaCare At Home is the home care division of ThedaCare, an integrated, community-owned health care system serving the Fox Cities and surrounding Wisconsin regions. The organization is northeast Wisconsin's second-largest employer with more than 5,000 employees. The company offers home medical equipment, nursing, hospice care, in-home and residential care, senior-care pharmacy, infusion therapy, specialty services and community health programs.

Patients Do the Traveling

But respiratory business drives the provider's sales, generating approximately 30 percent of its revenue. In 2001, the company split its respiratory department in two, creating separate pulmonary and sleep programs. In 2003, the sleep program made up 39 percent of respiratory revenue, and ThedaCare At Home served more than 1,600 patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a 40 percent increase over the number of newly diagnosed sleep patients serviced in 2002.

ThedaCare At Home manages its successful sleep program by asking clients to do the traveling themselves. Each of the provider's four branches has a special sleep treatment room, to which the company partially attributes the rise in sleep business.

“Our program offers a dedicated staff of respiratory therapists whose primary focus is sleep therapy,” says Kathryn Weiher, supervisor of respiratory services. “[In addition,] our change in where care is initiated has shifted in the past few years to a treatment room environment. This change has brought forth not only increased staffing efficiencies but also a better environment for patients to focus on the education we offer in respect to their prescribed therapy.”

The company's main goal with the treatment room is serving each customer as thoroughly and productively as possible. But another part of its M.O. for bringing patients in is exposing them to the company's additional DME offerings.

“The type of patient we're servicing [in the sleep program] is approximately a 45-year-old male or female. These are people who will be needing health care for a long time, not just for themselves but for their parents,” Weiher says. “When patients visit, they get the impression that we're more than just respiratory. They have to walk past the lift chairs and scooters to get to [the sleep treatment room]. This increases their total picture of ThedaCare.”