Health Burden is an easily understood and intuitive term that refers to the complexity of a resident’s health as well as the time, resources, and attention needed to safely manage a resident.
Although some residents with a lower Health Burden may be capable of managing some of their health demands, those with a higher Health Burden will usually require greater assistance from the AL, and this reflects a greater demand for:
- Staff time
- Staff expertise
- Personal Care services
- Wound checks
- Dietary Restrictions
- Medication supervision and delivery
- Coordination of Healthcare services
- Lab services
- Need for transportation to doctors’ appointments
Health Burden also reflects a resident’s risk for failing health. Those with a higher Health Burden are at greatest risk for loss to the ER, hospitalization, and transfer to a nursing home. Efficiently managing staff time by Pro-actively focusing their time resources on residents having high Health Burden scores will help stabilize residents’ health, preserve census, and increase AL profitability.
The Health Burden of AL residents isn’t often discussed. Although most of us can intuitively distinguish a resident with a high health burden from one with a low burden, without the ability to easily ‘measure’ or ‘put a number’ on a resident’s health burden, the discussions remain vague, and the value of this important concept goes unappreciated. Without actually measuring the health burden, AL resources are more or less distributed equally on all residents.
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Illumination Analytics has developed a novel method for objectively measuring the health burden of every resident. This allows the creation of a HEALTH BURDEN PROFILE of an AL which in turn yields the following benefits:
- It functions as a resident risk profile, such that residents with higher Health Burden scores pose a greater risk for failing health. This directs where to focus employee time resources.
- It yields an average Health Burden score for your AL, and this can be used as one of the determinants in level of appropriate staffing. It can also be used in marketing. If your AL has a higher Health Burden score, you can promote yourself as having experience managing the health of more complex residents, and this increases your referral base.
- By putting a “number” on a resident’s burden of care, it objectively helps justify the level of charge an AL must implement for a resident and removes the appearance of an arbitrary judgment.
Local hospitals and SNFs are significant referral sources for new residents, but they are being subjected to penalties for bad referral outcomes, such as ‘bounce backs’ for unnecessary 30 day readmissions, etc.
As a result, in the near future they will be requiring health metrics that demonstrate care and management excellence provided by the Assisted Living Facilities in their referral base.
HEALTH BURDEN PROFILES will help you seize this opportunity to showcase your facility as a leader in Assisted Living health management. You will differentiate yourself from among all your competition by showing the hospitals and SNFs real-time data (not just ‘feelings’ or ‘guesses’) that guide your health management. And you will be prepared for the near future when health metrics will be a prerequisite for referrals.
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