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When I first heard about Legacy Healthcare Services, I remember something about the name of the company that struck me. Legacy. The word has power behind it. It has hope, positivity, and purpose and I was drawn to it. When deciding to write a blog for the company, I thought long and hard about what it should be called and just knew that the word “Legacy” had to be involved. I couldn’t get the word out of my head, so I started doing some work on what it really meant. I broke open my friend—the thesaurus—and a myriad of synonyms are presented: aftermath, effect, outcome, and result.
There it is! OUTCOMES. RESULTS.
Yep. That’s why I’m drawn to it. Because in healthcare, we are (or should be) drawn to outcomes. Outcomes help to answer important questions such as:
- What is the result of the treatment plan implemented with someone who needed our care?
- Did a person achieve the goals we had for them and they had for themselves? How are we measuring what we did in comparison to all the other physical, occupational, and speech therapists in the world?
- Does our treatment have an impact on other areas of the person’s life? And, how do we prove to the entity that pays us (Medicare or other insurance payors), that treatment we provided resulted in positive change? (Hint: The answer is we prove that with outcomes.)
Outcomes tracking is the process of collecting information about a patient’s results as an impact of the therapeutic interventions that you provide. It’s data that can be drilled down and analyzed but at the end of the day, it is there in black and white to demonstrate if a patient made functional improvement, to what degree, and why.
According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, outcome measures reflect the impact of the service or intervention on the health status of the patient. In addition, an important aspect of outcome measures is described by the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) as “the ability to provide a common language with which to evaluate the success of (physical) therapy interventions to determine which intervention approaches comprise best clinical practice.”
In other words, the use of outcome measures across healthcare settings provides the ability to compare apples to apples and allows clinicians, patients, and payors to gain insight on how the person’s performance measures up to equivalent partner settings. This helps to determine best practice results and holds therapists to a gold standard of care.
We also have measurements of outcomes that serve to demonstrate how we, as a company, are impacting the lives of the residents we treat. In 2021, we identified that as a result of our continence management program, we were able to decrease episodes of urinary incontinence for residents on the program by 33% and implementation of our safety in motion program helped to reduce falls in a 30-day period by 54%. By examining these outcomes, we have direct sight of what is benefiting our residents, and what needs to be changed.
Our team of talented clinicians at Legacy Healthcare Services is passionate about outcomes! We track our outcomes and we share them with our partners. We want to know we are making an impact through the care we provide.
In other words, we want to be sure that we are leaving a Legacy.
References
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, US Department of Health and Human Services. 2013 National Healthcare Quality Report. AHRQ Publication No 14-0005. Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality;
Your Practice- Outcome Measurement (n.d). American Physical Therapy Association Retrieved July 15, 2020, from https://www.apta.org/your-practice/outcomes-measurement
Are you a senior living provider and interested in learning about how our SMILE program can impact the residents within your community? Contact our business development partner by clicking the email below. We’d be more than happy to share more information about how this program can impact the lives of your residents.