When Medicare and private health insurance providers began in 1983 to limit hospital benefits payments based upon a patient`s diagnosis, hospitals jumped on the home health-care bandwagon.
”It`s a matter of control,” said Pamela Meyer, president of Edward Hospital, Naperville, which co-owns Hospitals Home Health Care with Servicemaster and Copley Memorial Hospital. ”When we couldn`t keep patients in the hospital to insure quality care, home health care became essential. It became a new product line.”
In marketing lingo, she said, it`s called account control. With hospitals in fierce competition for patients, discharging a sick patient to a home health-care agency outside the hospital`s network can be a marketing blunder, especially, she said, ”if the patient feels abandoned by the hospital” or if the agency later refers the patient to another hospital.
”We keep our clients in their (member hospital) programs,” said Nancy Baer, administrator for Hospitals Home Health Care. ”If they need to be
(readmitted) we encourage patients to return to Edward or Copley. We certainly don`t send them somewhere else.”
”Truly the biggest reason for a hospital to have its own home health care program,” Meyer said, ”is because when reimbursers (Medicare and private insurers) say that they`re not going to pay anymore benefits for a patient, the hospital has got to discharge that patient or eat the cost of keeping him or her in the hospital. And the hospital can`t risk sending sick patients home without having some assurance that the patient will be cared for because of legal liability. So when the money runs out, it (home health-care services) gives you a way to send the patient home. It gives you an avenue out.”
