This article is sponsored by PlayMaker Health. In this interview, Home Health Care News sits down with PlayMaker Chief Executive Officer Gregg Boyle to learn about his career journey through health care technology, the most critical data points home health agencies need today, and how the specific challenges of the Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM) and COVID-19 play off of each other.

HHCN: Tell me a little bit about your background and how you came to lead PlayMaker Health.

Boyle: I’ve been involved in health care technology for about 20 years, with a number of companies, with my work heavily focused on helping health care agencies improve data-driven decision making. Just over two-and-a-half years ago, I joined PlayMaker Health because I saw post-acute care as a vertical that could benefit if given the ability to harness the power of data to accelerate decision making. Over the last two years, I’ve helped lead an acquisition that further strengthened the breadth of our data and launched two new products. At the beginning of this year, I stepped in as the CEO.

What are you seeing right now in terms of the biggest
challenges in this industry?

The pandemic is top of mind for everyone. It’s all we read about every day. I believe the largest challenge isn’t the pandemic itself, it’s our industry’s ability to be prepared for what happens post-pandemic. This was the PDGM year for home health. We came into Jan. 1 with everyone focused on the implications of payment reform. Some organizations were well prepared. Others were still preparing. Then 60 days in, we encountered an entirely new set of challenges related to COVID-19.

The challenge that
most organizations have right now is figuring out how they are going to sustain
through this gap in services. There are new constraints and restrictions
preventing agencies from allowing their nurses and their staff to see patients.
Agencies are focused on balancing the need to get through what’s happening in
the short-term while being prepared for when service demand gets reintroduced.
How do they balance that mix of continuing to keep staff utilized, finding
creative ways to use them to solve the right problems, keeping relationships
with patients but then also being prepared as demand increases here in the
short term?

As we come out at
the other end of this situation, they will be asking themselves, “Did I take
the right steps during this time to improve inefficiency I had in the business?
Did I take the right steps to reinforce relationships I had with my referral
networks and keep in touch with patients, families and facilities during this
time?” That way, as demand for services rebounds, they are prepared.

How can home health providers set themselves up for success? You mentioned working on efficiencies or different processes. Are there any specifics that you could mention on that?

Home health, like other industries impacted by this global pandemic, can use this as an opportunity to pause, reflect and figure out where we need to make improvements. It’s interesting to see how quickly some agencies have evolved past the “How long is this going to last, and how do we get through it?” mindset and have embraced the mindset of, “How do we take advantage and better ourselves during this time so that when things come back, we’re in a better place and a stronger place to do that?”

These agencies see
that this is really about data — about having the right visibility into their
referral networks, into how business dynamics are changing and where the
referrals are coming from. Between PDGM and COVID-19, do they really have their
fingers on the pulse of changes, do they understand what’s happening and can
they react as quickly as they need to?

Without the right
systems and the right data to understand in real time what’s happening in the
business, they’re going to be challenged. It’s not that they won’t be
successful, because there will be a large amount of demand that is introduced
into home health as these restrictions come back. The question becomes: Are you
as prepared to be successful as you could have been?

What are you seeing in regard to how agencies are
adapting and positioning themselves for when this demand surges?

It’s interesting:
Limitation really does breed innovation. When you’ve got constraints, it makes
you creative, and what I’ve seen in all of these organizations is that they’re
finding innovative ways to use their staff to provide value to these families and
these patients in ways they didn’t before.

They’re doing
meals-on-wheels, they’re delivering medication, they’re just finding new ways
to provide value to patients. And then they are communicating that, through the
right tools, back to their referral partners to make sure those partners
understand that they really are focused on the outcome of the patient.

I think they’re
building a better brand right now, those who are using this time to be creative
for their agencies and with their partners, than maybe they would have before.

How is PlayMaker supporting providers to maintain
existing referral relationships right now?

We are a post-acute
workflow and business intelligence company that focuses on helping agencies
understand and improve those valuable relationships. Our solutions expose
hidden insights into new opportunities, evolving risks, inefficiencies within
the marketing process and changes to the quality of their networks. The goal of
this is to give providers the information they need to forge and maintain
strong relationships with their partners.

Using our platform,
agencies get up-to-date information on what referrals are flowing into their
business. They can see how referral patterns are changing, and quickly take
action. With a few taps on their smartphone, they can quickly connect with the
discharge planner from the facility where a referral originated and be able to
talk in detail about the patient that was referred based on data right there on
their phone that was seamlessly synced directly from their electronic medical
record.

Once the call is
done, if there is a follow-up, our application transcribes their comments into
notes that can be referenced by intake back at the agency.

Then, within our
platform, we aggregate the data from all of these interactions into trends and
patterns that give the sales managers and executives visibility into
performance indicators, showing both the health and new opportunities within
the referral process.

What do you see as the most critical data that home
health agencies need right now, and how has that changed over the last year?

Let’s start by
saying that data itself is one of the most critical things a home health agency
needs. If we keep on the topic of referral management, the way that agencies can
capture the data they need is by asking, “Where is the opportunity?”
and, “How effective are we at converting that opportunity into
admissions?”

To gain these
insights, they need complete visibility into how patients are flowing from
facilities and the community into home health, and who is potentially
influencing those decisions. Once they have those market insights, they then
need the operational ones that provide visibility into how their agency is
interacting with those opportunities and where they rank compared to their
competition.

Understanding the
benchmarking that comes with this competitive aspect is more critical now than
ever. It’s no longer good enough to just survive. You need to thrive in this
environment in order to maneuver through the future of value-based care and
payment reform.

What’s on the horizon for PlayMaker? You mentioned some
of the exciting things that have happened so far under your leadership. Is
there anything that you’re excited about what’s coming down the pike?

There are a few
interesting things on the horizon. We are uniquely positioned to provide market
intelligence mixed with behavioral sales analytics, giving agencies near
real-time views into how effectively they are growing their referral networks.
We are focused on ensuring agencies not only understand where opportunities
exist, but how to manage and mitigate where they are sub-optimized from a sales
process perspective.

What is the greatest opportunity that you see for home
health this year?

I just echo what I
think a lot of people are now quickly realizing, which is that serving patients
in their homes is absolutely the most cost-effective and safest place for
patients. What we’re going through right now has only confirmed it. I think
home health will be one of the shining stars that comes out after the COVID
challenges. The entire world is quickly learning that many of the things we
thought had to be completed in an office can be done very effectively from the
home. Home health will be a big beneficiary of this shift.

Editor’s note: This interview
has been edited for length and clarity.

PlayMaker Health is a post-acute growth platform serving hundreds of
home-based care organizations. To learn how we can help your business, visit us
at playmakerhealth.com.

The Voices Series is a
sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends,
topics, and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For
more information on Voices, please contact [email protected].