Visiting Nurse Association Health & Hospice (VNA Health Group), New Jersey’s largest nonprofit home health provider, is elevating its partnership with Medline to enhance efforts in reducing hospital readmissions and standardizing skin health clinical education. VNA Health Group will be investing in a new remote patient monitoring platform offered by Medline to gain access to real-time data needed to quickly adjust patient care plans as needed.
An industry report estimates up to $250 billion of U.S. healthcare spending could potentially be shifted to virtual care. As COVID-19 encouraged care providers to make remote care more readily available to patients, insurance providers are now increasing reimbursement for remote patient monitoring. On average, CMS approved reimbursements of $120 per patient per month.
With more than 12,000 home health patients seen on any given day, Medline is working with VNA Health Group’s 30-plus offices to implement remote patient monitoring through VitalTech to help reduce readmissions, and enhance outcomes through virtual care. VitalTech’s VitalCare platform will help automate the collection of key patient vitals, nutritional data, medication compliance information and changes to activities of daily living through Bluetooth-connected devices. Through the VitalCare Family App, family members will also be able to access a patient’s health data and real-time alerts will be pushed to them if a patient’s health metric is outside a certain range.
“Healthcare is a partnership and providing compassionate, coordinated care requires collaboration from our vendors like Medline,” said Andrew Wheeler, director of Therapy Specialty Services for VNA Health Group. “The pandemic has taught us a lot about our relationship with caregivers and working with Medline has allowed us to leverage their clinical expertise to evolve our approach and help clinicians perform at their best.”
Building upon an existing partnership foundation
Medline has been a medical supplier for the VNA Health Group for more than 10 years, but the partnership quickly evolved when the pandemic hit. With over 1,000 clinicians, the organization needed support standardizing skin and wound care, an area that became a greater challenge during COVID-19. To help elevate clinical skills, Medline educated clinicians in the field on guidelines and proper usage of products by facilitating more than 20 clinical education sessions through the company’s Skin Health Solutions Program.
“Partnership to us means thinking beyond just providing products and working with VNA Health Group to create customized solutions to their everyday challenges. We are grateful for their continued collaboration and the elevated trust that’s developed during the pandemic to help their organization run butter,” said Zach Pocklington, senior vice president for Medline’s Post-Acute Care division.