Overview

Whose ounce of prevention is worth the pound of cure? With the Total Patient Cost report you can compare agencies by the average Medicare spend for patients in the three months, six months or year following a SNF admission. Lower average overall costs indicate that an agency’s service is bending the cost curve for patients. Sometimes creating a better long-term outcome requires a bigger upfront investment!

  Using this information, you can improve your impact on the cost of providing care for a patient population and position yourself as a compelling partner for health systems that are focused on reducing overall costs within their patient population.

This report page includes a table and a graph that contain average Medicare expenditures for patients receiving treatment by the SNFs that you select for examination. You can view these averages for a 3 month, 6 month or 12 month period aligned with the start of care for the SNF. In addition, you can limit which claims data are used to calculate the averages by patient acuity, age, or by specific Trella Health Diagnostic Grouping.

Steps to use this Page

 Select Comparisons - required setup

When you click on the  button, you will be able to add up to 7 Home Health agencies to the table and chart for comparison. The following interface will open when you click the button:

  Usage

• The Search field will allow you to enter a home health agency name or NPI to find it quickly.
• If you have selected favorite agencies, you can find them by clicking Favorites in the list on the left.
• User Skilled Nursing Facilities - will include every agency to which you have access.
• Once you have populated the Search Results field on the right, you can click on an agency to add it to your Selected Comparison(s). The agencies you add to the Selected Comparison(s) field will appear in the report table and chart.

 Best Practice - make sure you add your own agency to Selected Comparison(s) in order to compare your performance against your competitors.

 Filters

You can focus the content of the table and chart using the filters.

 The filters are a powerful tool for evaluation. If a single agency is the most expensive, or the least, you can choose different filters to find out why. Choose an age filter to see who is spending the most on the oldest and therefore, most acute patients. Or examine different diagnoses to identify who is treating the most difficult patients, who might cost more.

 When you choose Acuity, Age, or MDC, an additional filter option will open to allow additional refinement of the chosen filter type. The options in the new filter, Filter Selection, are shown below.

Filter Type

This allows you to choose different sets of patients for which the metrics on the page will be calculated:

Length of Follow up Period

With this filter you can change the period from which we gather expenses to be added to the report. The time periods begin at the time of SNF start of care and you can select a 3-month, 6-month, or 12-month period of time.

In order to provide the necessary period of time from Admission to the end of the most recent quarter of data, we offset the one year reporting period to provide a full year of admissions.

   Although three month follow up period is not shown in this image, it follows the same pattern.

 Risk Adjusted Cost

 Clicking this toggle will adjust the metric on the page to present a risk-adjusted version of the table and chart. Since higher patient risk scores indicate a population with more severe medical conditions, adjusting the cost based on population severity allows for a more comparable cost analysis among home health agencies.

The HCC risk scores are used to adjust cost relative to other NPIs of the same provider type. Adjusted costs allow for better comparison across NPIs with different risk scores because it accounts for the increased cost of patients with chronic conditions. For example, NPIs with a higher than average risk score will have a reduced adjusted cost since they have sicker patients, and NPIs with lower risk scores have increased adjusted cost.

For more information on Risk Scores - 

 Total Cost Table

 This table contains the key metrics for the selected agencies. Examine the chart below

 Follow-Up in this table is not a reference to subsequent care, it is a reference to the different periods of time you can select to apply as the length of time during which the table includes expenses after the start of care.

 Comparison Chart

The report includes an interactive chart. Hovering over a bar in the graph shows the Medicare spend broken out by claim type.

    Clicking on any of the elements in the legend will turn that claim type off or on in the chart. By using this feature, you can have one, some, or all claim types shown, in any combination.