A Premier Plan for Patient Care

Taking time to differentiate your home medical equipment company from the rest of the pack may seem impossible with the industry's current focus on survival in the face of competitive bidding and reduced reimbursements.

Yet Premier HomeCare, a Louisville, Ky.-based provider, has made a name for itself by empowering patients, thereby improving clinical outcomes and increasing referrals. And the company is doing it through disease management.

Keeping Patients Healthy

The 10-year-old company, which has seven locations in Kentucky and Indiana, offers three disease management programs for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (“Breathe Healthy”), sleep-disordered breathing (“Sleep Healthy”) and congestive heart failure (“Heart Healthy”).

“The federal government has recognized through a 13-state grant that patients do better in their home where they want to be,” says Wayne Knewasser, vice president of public relations and government affairs for Premier. “Part of keeping individuals in their homes is providing caregivers and patients with tools to meet basic needs on a scheduled basis, including education on what they need to know to take care of themselves.”

Disease management is a system of coordinated health care interventions and communications for populations with conditions in which patient self-care efforts are significant, according to the Disease Management Association of America.

Programs should “support the physician or practitioner/patient relationship and plan of care, emphasize prevention of exacerbations and complications utilizing evidence-based practice guidelines and patient empowerment strategies, and evaluate clinical, humanistic, and economic outcomes on an ongoing basis with the goal of improving overall health,” according to the DMAA.

Premier's disease management programs aim to do just that.

Patients are automatically entered in the programs upon referral, Knewasser says. Each program provides education on the disease process and the physician's prescribed therapies and medications. Patients also receive comprehensive instructions and information on the equipment they have received.

The programs involve home visits by licensed health care professionals who offer an assessment of the living environment and provide respiratory assessment with oximetry screening. All assessment results and patient outcomes are reported to the referring physician.