Back to school with value-based purchasing (VBP) courses
Post - Back to school with value-based purchasing (VBP) courses
Level up your caregivers’ skills and improve VBP performance ratings.
On its face, value-based purchasing (VBP) courses for home health agencies is common sense. Developing caregivers' skills and knowledge improves patient outcomes. This makes offering VBP training is one of the easiest and most effective ways to increase your quality score for 2023. Better rates of care will result in higher reimbursement from CMS.
In practice, it’s a challenging call to action.
Home health agencies often deal with the frailest patients in the healthcare system. Falls are nearly inevitable, and one wound that won’t heal can be devastating.
As reimbursement rates shift toward quality of care, now’s the time for home health agencies to help caregivers level up in skills, allowing them to provide better preventative care.
VBP courses like fall prevention, wound care and electrolyte imbalance give caregivers additional skills that can prevent hospital readmissions. Plus, better care helps your bottom line. Sharing evidence of better care with CMS – like reducing hospital admissions – can help your home health agency negotiate a better reimbursement rate.
At showd.me, we’ve found caregivers are anxious to level up their skill set as well. Working in seniors’ homes means they’re often positioned to identify changes in behavior, potential fall risks or a general decline in activities of daily living. Providing formal education to caregivers through engaging VBP courses improves their job performance. And it means more people know when to alert the clinical team about a potential issue.
Proactive caregiving helps patients stay independent at home longer and improves your home care agency’s reimbursement rates.
Positive end-user feedback submissions on VBP courses
showd.me content typically has over a 90% user satisfaction rate. End users of our VBP courses rate the material even higher than the required compliance training. We also found that caregivers do more than one optional course when home care agencies offer VBP courses.
Here’s some of what they said upon completing VBP courses:
- "The learning paths are a great start for providing more skills to many caregivers."
- "This was all very good learning :)"
- "Yes, I would recommend this program. It is very helpful. Thank you very much."
- "I recommend this to caregivers. Thank you for such an important teaching."
Get started with VBP courses now
Many agencies have been providing caregivers with VBP training for years, and if you haven’t been, the time to start is now because you are already behind.
The following conditions can lead to an avoidable hospitalization of your patients. showd.me offers training in these areas so your caregivers and HHAs can detect issues before they happen.
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Fall Risk Precautions
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Pain Management
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Urinary Incontinence
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Bowel Incontinence
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Depression and Loneliness
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Vaccines and Immunizations
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Heart Failure
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Electrolyte Imbalance
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Respiratory Infection
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Sepsis
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Anemia
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Urinary Tract Infection (UTI)
Role of caregiver training to reduce falls
The role of home health caregiver training to reduce falls in fall prevention cannot be overstated. Caregivers provide vital assistance to seniors, helping them with tasks such as bathing, dressing, and mobility. They’re in seniors’ homes, identifying risks firsthand and noticing any decline. They often have more interaction and insight than other providers and even family.
This often makes them the first line of defense when preventing falls. Caregivers can help reduce the risk of falls by providing supervision and support to seniors during activities that can increase their risk of falling.
Training to reduce falls should include the following:
- Proper fall-prevention techniques, including safely moving a senior from one position or location to another.
- Proper body mechanics when assisting seniors with activities like getting out of bed or standing up from a chair.
- Assessing a senior's balance and gait.
- Identifying environmental hazards in the home.
- Inspecting medical equipment such as walkers and wheelchairs to ensure they are properly maintained.
- Emergency response procedures if a fall does occur.
Grab an ebook to get up to speed on VBP courses by clicking on the image below.
Training to reduce falls helps lower risks
Falls are a major concern for seniors, particularly in home healthcare settings. Understanding the causes of falls can help healthcare agencies reduce their occurrence and create a safer environment for clients.
Balance is the most common cause of falls among seniors. An unsteady gait can be due to any number of age-related balance issues, such as:
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Muscle weakness
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Medication that causes dizziness or drowsiness
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Environmental hazards
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Vision problems
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Cognitive impairments that make it difficult to recognize potential risks
Training caregivers to pay close attention to changes in a senior’s behavior or health status that may indicate an increased risk of falling can help minimize risks.
Falls prevention training that raises awareness about the consequences of falls can also motivate caregivers to implement prevention strategies. Falls can lead to serious injuries such as fractures that have long-term effects on health and wellbeing – and even cause death. According to the CDC, about 36 million falls are reported among older adults annually — resulting in more than 32,000 deaths. About 3 million older adults are treated in emergency departments for a fall injury each year.
Fear of falling can lead to social isolation, further exacerbating the risk of falling by limiting physical activity.
With 65% of your agency’s Quality Score based on topics that caregivers can be trained on – like fall prevention – showd.me’s VBP training is the perfect solution to help you protect your agency, avoid penalties and go after positive adjustments.
Watch a webinar clip about VBP for what you need to know now and what to expect in the future.
Click here to get started with showd.me VBP courses.
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