In an increasingly data-driven world, data and metrics are essential for home-based care companies to track growth and success, as well as potential areas of concern.  

Home Health Care News asked five executives for their thoughts on the most essential metrics to watch within their organizations.

For the CEO of Team Select Home Care, the most-watched metric comes down to patient volume.

“It sounds overly simple,” Fred Johnson, president and CEO, told HHCN. “If we don’t have the volume first, we can’t have any margin. … This is the kind of business where if you’re not growing, you’re dying.”

Phoenix-based Team Select Home Care provides pediatric and adult private duty nursing, long-term home-based clinical care and family-centered support programs in 16 states.

Patient census is also one of the most critical metrics for Christopher Rinn, CEO of VNA Health Group.

“I look at our daily census in all of our programs, and that means you know that that’s an indicator to me on how we’re delivering on our mission,” Rinn said. “How many people are we helping? How many people are depending on us? And everything flows down from there.”

The Visiting Nurse Association Health Group (VNA Health Group) is a nonprofit provider of home and community-based care in New Jersey. The organization provides home health, hospice, palliative care and private-pay personal care services, among other offerings.

Volume alone does not capture the quality of care delivered — or whether that care is helping patients avoid more costly settings.

Hospitalization rates came up for several polled leaders. Johnson remarked that hospitalization rates are his second most-watched metric. This statistic can demonstrate the value of Team Select’s care to payers, with which the company has risk-based contracts.

“I’ve been obsessively reviewing our 30-day hospitalization rate and our average length of stay,” Johnson said. “This can open up a whole new way of contracting with payers and doing business where we’ll take that risk on, betting on ourselves to keep those children out of the hospital.”

Hospitalizations are also top of mind for Deka Dike, founder and CEO of Omatochi. Part of the need to track hospitalizations stems from the Dublin, California-based company’s geographic location.

“We have frequent fires, and we have a lot of people [who] keep going back into the hospital, and when they do, that means it’s not safe for them to be by themselves,” Dike told HHCN.

One of the goals of California’s Medicaid program is to reduce hospitalizations among older adults, she added, so when hospitalizations are reduced, Omatochi is doing its job.

Omatochi provides technology-integrated personal home care to Medicaid beneficiaries in California. 

In addition to patient- and client-focused metrics, leaders are focused on metrics related to their frontline workers. Jon Siegel, founder and CEO of the Perfect Companion, most closely monitors retention among clients and caregivers. Home care providers must be proactive about their clients, he said, and anticipate their needs before they ask.

“I’m always thinking, ‘How do I anticipate our clients’ needs, our caregivers’ needs?’” Siegel told HHCN. “I want to show them that I’m thinking about them.”

Based in Phoenix, the Perfect Companion is a luxury concierge in-home care provider operating in Arizona, Ohio and Tennessee.

A holistic view

While certain metrics may take top priority, leaders also emphasized the importance of a holistic view of a home-based care organization.

A single metric can sometimes fail to tell the whole story, according to VNA Health Group’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer, Kevin Rogers. For instance, a frontline worker may be scheduled for six to seven visits a day for five days and appear to be busy. But some of those visits may be shortened or canceled, making the schedule appear to be a full caseload when it is actually a short one.

Leaders cannot look at one metric in a vacuum, he said.

Among the group of metrics Rogers keeps top of mind are productivity, admissions and the number of visits per episode per period.

“All these things go in the mixing bowl, and when one goes up, that’s not maybe a major concern, but when two or three of them are triggering in the wrong direction, what are you going to do about it?” he said.