Shelly Necke, RN, speaks with HealthLeaders about the benefits of the post-acute provider being part of a larger health system.
PIH Health Home Health was recently acknowledged as an honoree for the Best Homecare program by the Los Angeles Business Journal. The post-acute care service provider is part of the larger PIH Health system, which serves over 3.7 million residents in the greater Los Angeles area with three hospitals, 35 outpatient medical offices, a medical specialty group, and a full spectrum of post-acute care services.
According to Shelly Necke, RN, PIH Health's vice president of post acute services, it was the expansion of the home health branch's service area that made them stand out for the honor. In addition to the greater Los Angeles area, over the last year PIH Health Home Health has expanded its reach to downtown Los Angeles and San Bernardino County.
HealthLeaders spoke with Necke about PIH Health Home Health's patient-first vision and the benefits of being part of a larger health system as a post-acute service provider.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
HealthLeaders: Being in the Los Angeles area, what is the importance of having a full spectrum of post-acute services available to the community?
Shelly Necke, RN: Our vision is patients first, and as a nonprofit organization serving our community, it affords us the opportunity to take care of our community members and our patients in the best way possible and being able to help them transition through life. We take care of the acute needs in the hospital setting, and in having different levels of service, we can basically help the patient transition to the level they need all the way to their end of life. We also have two beautiful hospice houses, which is rare in the Los Angeles market, so just being able to utilize a setting like that that we could place a patient in and help them transition at the end of their life.
HL: What sets PIH Health Home Health apart from other homecare providers?
Necke: PIH Health Home Health has been providing in-home nursing, therapy, and social services since 1951, so it's something that we know well and know how to do well. Being part of a large health system affords us the opportunity to have the connections and resources that we need to be able to have efficient workflows and systems out in the field. We service approximately 6,000 patients annually. We provide the full spectrum of home health services, including a new program called remote patient monitoring, which is designed to keep patients safe and out of the hospital.
It was key that we aligned all of our post-acute care services under one leadership structure and that we have the full spectrum, because being able to service those 6,000 patients with a home health service line, when that patient needs to transition to palliative care or to hospice or back to the acute care hospital, we have a full spectrum of services we can utilize to take care of that patient to the best of our abilities.
HL: Many systems are beginning to explore remote patient monitoring. What has been PIH Health Home Health's experience with it so far?
Necke: Remote patient monitoring gives us the ability to place a device in the patient's home that they can interact with. There's a tablet that will ask them different questions throughout the day, and they have Bluetooth devices, [for example], they can weigh themselves and the device will send the information to the tablet. They take their pulse, blood pressure, and all those things including the questions they answer, go into a system that is managed by an RN that is monitoring those trends based on a care plan that we established for the patient.
We can quickly identify any trends that may be changing for a patient [where] we may need to intervene, notify their physician, go out and conduct a visit, and it just gives us a better picture of those high-risk patients in the field. It has impacted readmission rates to the hospital because you can take care of their needs as more care is being delivered in the home, and most patient's preference is to receive care within the home, and they do better in their own home environment. We're well positioned to meet those needs within the home and deliver that kind of care in a timely manner.
HL: How did being part of a larger health system enable PIH Health Home Health to perform efficiently over the last few years, especially with the challenges presented by the pandemic?
Necke: Being connected to an integrated delivery system has benefited us greatly. More importantly, we [have] a disaster resource center and are well trained to respond to disasters within the community. Myself, [having been with the system] 25 years, I've been trained each year. We have a significant hospital command center that we deployed, and because I've been involved in that within the acute care hospitals, we deployed that in our post-acute care service line. We were able to efficiently organize a timely response to the events of the pandemic and keep our patients and our staff safe, and we had different types of new workflows that we created to meet the needs as they changed every single day, and we're still doing that.
Jasmyne Ray is the revenue cycle editor at HealthLeaders.