Session Descriptions

Keynote Address: Tracking the Care of Patients with Severe Chronic Illness &
End of Life Care
More than 90 million Americans suffer from a chronic illness. Although chronic diseases are responsible for the majority of deaths in the U.S., care is remarkably uneven with both underuse of effective care and overuse of expensive treatments that provide little patient benefit. This session will present recent published and unpublished findings from the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care that reveal unwarranted variation in the end of life care of Medicare beneficiaries with chronic illness. The sources of the variation and proposed remedies to reduce medical care variation will also be discussed.

Information to Drive Change
Information is powerful and transformative, especially in the healthcare industry today. As policies and politics shift, organizations that are better armed with information are better positioned to achieve their desired results - whether that is impacting patient quality, profitability, or overall policy.

To ensure future success home health and hospice agencies need to be better equipped to use the wealth of information that is available to them.

This session, led by Amanda Twiss, President & CEO of OCS will explore trends in data use throughout the healthcare industry and discuss initiatives agencies can take to position themselves at the forefront of these emerging trends.

PPS 2008: Where Has it Taken Us?
Christine Lang, Vice President of Data and Product Strategy, OCS will present this comprehensive and meaningful look at data results on financial performance under the new PPS 2008 rules.  This informative presentation will cover high level trends in case weights and reimbursement, and a detailed look at key drivers of reimbursement and profitability under the revised rules, including diagnosis coding, anticipated and actual therapy utilization, and the new non-routine supply add-on component.

Specialized Hospice Breakout I: Optimizing Hospice Staffing Using Data to Drive Quality and Effectiveness
With the new CoP's heightened focus on data-driven care and operational management, the new CMS visit reporting requirements, a shrinking supply of nurses, and ever-increasing financial pressures, hospices must optimize the management and ongoing development of their most critical resource - their people. In this session, we will identify the key dimensions of staffing-related compliance and performance and demonstrate data-driven approaches and specific tools that provide direction for strategic planning, managerial decision-making and compliance control.

Industry Prospectus: A Review of the Financial Health of the Industry
In 2008, the industry endured its first major payment reform in more than seven years. What effects has the change in PPS 2008 had on agencies across the United States? This session will answer that question, exploring the nuts and bolts of PPS Reimbursement Data Analysis. Additionally, we will discuss how PPS reform has impacted the merger and acquisition market in terms of buyer makeup, strategies, timing, supply and demand, and perhaps most importantly, valuation. Finally, we will discuss and highlight how the proposed Pay-for-Performance (P4P) structure will further have impact on our industry by reviewing current P4P Demonstration Project outcomes.

Specialized Hospice Breakout II: Hospice Quality & Access: Harnessing A Growing National Healthcare Priority
Hospice, already recognized as a valued, high-quality healthcare service, is gaining prominence nationally. Hospice now represents the fastest growing component of Medicare spending. Playing a strategic role in our healthcare system, hospice programs need to be managed and utilized by home heath providers in a strategic, quality-focused way. In this session, we will offer compelling reasons why home health agencies should reach out to hospices, and explore innovative ways for hospice organizations to proactively work with home health agencies.

Pragmatic Applications of Technology in Healthcare
Technology has allowed us as a society to do amazing things, including communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world and at any time of the day. Technology has also facilitated tremendous advances in healthcare. We are just scratching the surface of how technology can be used to transform and improve clinician-to-clinician communication, patient education and monitoring, clinical efficiency, and community involvement. This session will explore technology's role in shaping the future of healthcare.

Specialized Hospice Breakout III: Hospice Now and Into the Future
This educational session will work through the details of the new QAPI CoP. The course will examine the details of the new Quality Assessment and Performance Improvement Condition of Participation and define the steps hospices need to take to embrace the data-driven management requirements.

The focus will be on doing QAPI right. We will clarify the minimum program you need for compliance and the incremental commitment you should make to build an evolving, powerful performance management capability. The session will include a discussion of data elements needed to monitor effectiveness, safety of service and quality of care allowing hospices to track adverse events, analyze their causes and help implement preventative actions.

Panel Discussion: "Using Information to Drive Change"
With all the changes that have faced the home care industry over the past year and a half and the pending changes that our country is facing, it is important that home care agencies work together as a unified voice to continue to provide the best value in healthcare and the highest quality of service to patients. This panel will be made up of representatives from a variety of organizations who will come together to discuss their best practices for using information to manage agency performance, improvement in patient care, and mitigate change. This is a session you don't want to miss!

Specialized Hospice Breakout IV: A Strategic Approach to Hospice Compliance
A seasoned hospice executive describes critical issues in compliance, addressing the challenges and inconsistencies across the variety of regulatory, legislative and reimbursement requirements. Vivian, who leads a large and growing hospice program and is a nationally-recognized compliance educator, will discuss how to ensure compliance, while focusing the organization on broader strategic goals and opportunities. In this interactive session, participants are encouraged to raise compliance questions and concerns, as well as share their own successes in strategic compliance.

Best Practices of the 2007 Home Care Elite and 2008 Home Care Elite Unveiling
This session will explore the best practices of agencies that were recognized as one of the 2007 HomeCare Elite, the compilation of the most successful home care providers in the country based on measures in quality care, quality improvement and financial performance.

We will explore leading trends and operational characteristics based on a comparative analysis of HomeCare Elite agencies. We will also demonstrate a case study of an actual HCE agency, highlighting the practices that they consider to be the key to their success.