Main Conference Agenda
Profit Through Home Care Innovations: Technology
EXPO
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
7:30 a.m.-8:30 a.m. Registration & Continental Breakfast – Expo Hall Open
8:30 a.m.-10:30 a.m.
Product Drill Down: Features, Functions & Evaluations
of All the Key Vendors and Systems
Mark Anderson, CEO of AC Group, Houston
Fasten your seat belt for the most comprehensive IT system
review in home health, from one of the nation’s premier
IT researchers, speakers and longtime healthcare CIO Mark
Anderson. Mark regularly assists home health administrators
and vendors with business strategy, competitive analysis and
product profiling – and he’s here to do it for
you, too. Hear what specific products are hot in home care
technology from point-of-care and telehealth to financial
and clinical systems. Drill down into the features/functions
of these systems, as he evaluates and, in some cases, shows
off the hardware on stage.
10:30 a.m.-10:50 a.m. Networking & Refreshments in Expo Hall
10:50 a.m.-Noon
How to Select the Right Information System for Your
Needs
Rob
Rossi, Healthcare Technologist, Phoenix,
Ariz.
Now that you’ve been briefed on the vendors, features & functions,
this session will help you pinpoint the right technologies
and systems to target for your HHA. Rob Rossi, an IT guru
with his hands on the pulse of the latest technologies, will
fill you in on how to select the right system, create a weighted/scored
Request for Proposal and uncover proven tactics to negotiate
a deal that could save your agency tens of thousands of dollars. Bonus:
You’ll get a checklist of tips, tactics and questions
to ask our exhibitors, as well as full descriptions of their
products. It’s all part of our Conference Buyer’s
Guide.
Noon-1:00 p.m. Lunch
1:00 p.m.-1:30 p.m. Dessert served in the Expo Hall
1:30 p.m.-2:30 p.m.
Point-of-Care: Streamline Data Collection with the
Right Tools for Your Shop
Fran Lorion, CIO, VNA of Boston
The pace of technological innovation means that your next
POC system purchase is likely to result in an entirely new
type of system. But the choices are varied – Tablet
PCs? Laptops? PDAs? – and the right solution is heavily
dependent on your environment and services. Consider the VNA
of Boston, which has gained national attention for its use
of Fujitsu LifeBook Tablet PC convertible notebooks that allow
mobile nurses to create and update records on the fly, vastly
improving outcomes, billing accuracy, cash flow and even clerical
productivity. But their 3-year life cycle is up, and VNA Boston
now plans to exploit the city’s wireless broadband capability
at the point-of-care. Discover what it selected, why and how
it balanced cost, usability, network performance and key innovations.
2:30 p.m.-2:50 p.m. Networking & Refreshments in Expo Hall
2:50 p.m.-4:00 p.m.
Telephony: The Quick ROI Path to Process
Improvement Under PPS & P4P
John Mancuso,
Chief Technology Officer, Valley Home Care, Paramus, N.J.
The new PPS rules include many complex layers that require
predictive modeling and clinical data collection that heavily
impact not just payment, but outcomes under Pay-for-Performance.
But gaining that data doesn’t have to be complex. Discover
how telephony – the use of software to record visit
times, actions on the plan of care and an audit trail – have
eased the PPS burden and led to critical process improvements
for a fraction of the cost of leading-edge solutions.
4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m.
Dashboards, Indicators & Technology
ROI: A Better Approach to Monitor Success.
Ed Molare, System VP for corporate services,
Provena Health, Mokena, Ill.
Strong financial and operational dashboards can give agency
leaders reliable data to monitor business performance and
extract gold nuggets of actionable intelligence. But what’s
the best way to develop and use them? Ed Molare shares
his successful approach to reports that help him justify IT
and other spending, work smartly with clinicians, identify
problematic OASIS input and laser in on operational uniformity. Take-Home
Tool: Screen shots and spreadsheets you can model
for your own agency.
5:00 p.m.-6:30 p.m. Cocktail
Reception in the Expo Hall – sponsored by NDSI
Relax, unwind and revisit some of the day’s sessions’ topics.
Swap success stories and nagging problems with your colleagues
and presenters. Visit exhibiting vendors and find out what solutions
they offer your agency.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
8:00 a.m.-9:15 a.m. Continental Breakfast in Expo Hall
9:15 a.m.-10:15 a.m.
Telehealth: Achieve Results that Supercharge
Outcomes & Referrals
Donna DeBlois, Executive Director,
Kno-Wal-Lin Homecare and Hospice, Rockland, Maine
Many HHAs remain skeptical of telehealth – and
for good reason. The promise is not always matched by results,
and ROI can be slow. But success has as much to do with agency
planning as with the technology. One HHA has turned heads
in the physician community by slashing hospitalization days,
visits per episode and more, using telehealth. Plus: 80% of
the cost was absorbed through grants, and 98% of its 75 units
are fully utilized! Now, the HHA has expanded the program
to pediatric care. You can do it, too. Get the blueprint for
best practices in implementation, clinical use, physician
communication, patient education and more.
10:15 a.m.-11:00 a.m. Networking & Refreshments
in Expo Hall
(Exhibits close at 11:00
a.m.)
11:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Hands-On Workshop on Clinician Buy-In
Suzanne B. Sblendorio, Director
of the Simione Consultants IT division
Home health competition gets fiercer by the day: from securing
top referral sources, to recruitment & retention of caregivers,
to ensuring the highest reimbursement possible through accurate
and efficient OASIS, coding and billing. The complexity of
PPS makes this even more urgent. The savviest agencies have
turned to in-the-field technology – laptops, PDAs, tablets,
telehealth, electronic pens – to quickly advance their
clinical operations, achieving lightning-quick ROI once
they achieve significant clinical buy-in. But such buy-in
is not easy. It requires a rich understanding of how nurses
perform their field work, how to address legitimate fears
about patient acuity, innate questions about their long-term
relevance and many other factors.
In this hands-on workshop, Suzanne Sblendorio, who has helped dozens of agencies and their clinicians successfully and quickly adapt to various new technologies, will share strategies that are working right now at agencies across the country. Then, you’ll break down the challenges to IT adoption in small working groups to arrive at training tips that will speed adoption and ensure a fast ROI.
12:30 p.m. Conference Adjourns
