Home-based care providers work hard to make sure patients get the support they need. This commitment drives their constant search for high-quality data to guide and enhance care. With actionable data, they can simplify workflows, optimize resources and enhance patient outcomes.
Tyler Rardin knows this. As General Manager of HME & Infusion at Trella Health, Rardin oversees Trella’s HME, infusion and specialty pharmacy divisions, bringing data to provide unparalleled visibility into the market. Why is that? Because the insights that Trella is able to provide HME providers is based on an astonishing claims data set representing 255 million patients and 7 billion all payer claims.
“Over the years, Trella has heavily invested in building, what we feel, is the most comprehensive data set in the market,” Rardin says.
For home-based care providers delivering HME, infusion or specialty pharmacy services, daily challenges in care delivery are constant. Overcoming these challenges starts with access to the right data for making informed decisions. Atlanta-based Trella Health provides health care providers with comprehensive data insights and analytics, empowering them to drive business growth and improve patient outcomes.
Rardin offers his insights on this unprecedented data collection sharing how home-based care can leverage data and innovation to drive growth in the HME sector.
Today’s top challenges for HME and infusion providers
Rardin highlights a range of challenges facing HME providers, but perhaps none as impactful as a shift in identity: viewing themselves as “providers” rather than merely “suppliers.” This subtle shift in mindset, he says, can fundamentally change how they approach their role in patient care.
That paradigm split is something that those in the HME space need to wrap their heads around, and it plays into the next challenge that Rardin sees in that space: how HME providers can change the “commodity” perception and instead gain a seat at the value-based care table.
“Most clinicians and payers don’t fully understand all of the services HME providers are doing to support the patients they are serving,” Rardin says. “A great example is CGM (Continuous Glucose Monitoring). Many pharmacies are now selling CGMs but haven’t yet integrated the necessary support to ensure patient adherence and proper use, which could help avoid adverse events.
Reimbursement being so tethered to CMS poses a challenge to providers, an area of difference compared to infusion, Rardin notes, where so many infusion providers rely heavily on commercial business due to lack of Medicare coverage.
“We are seeing more and more home-based care providers — home health, HME, etc. — looking to further diversify payer contracts,” Rardin says. “Having a Medicare payer mix of 50%+ creates a lot of risk in the business. The total Medicare annual spend is out of control and CMS is really pushing hard on reimbursement rates across all segments, HME being one that has been hit hard.”
The Trella Effect: how providers are winning with data innovation
The challenges Rardin lays out shows just how difficult running a healthy HME business can be. Uncertainty is everywhere. Carving predictability from that uncertainty separates the winners from the stragglers.
“If you think about 10 years ago, there really wasn’t an offering like what Trella provides today,” he says. “A lot of strategies for growth were based on word-of-mouth or gut feeling. Trella eliminates the guesswork. You now know exactly where you stand in your market in terms of market share and the percentage of referrals you’re getting from each referral source.”
In the past, a doctor might tell a provider that she is sending them 90% of her referrals. With Trella’s data, providers don’t have to take the doctor’s word. They can validate that figure.
Rardin sees Trella’s impact in three main areas:
- The breadth of their data. “We are acquiring data from a lot of different sources, whether it’s payers, clearinghouses, directly from CMS, and now pharmacies,” Rardin says.
- Purpose-built solutions. The solutions from Trella differ by the segment, and they are coming quickly. “Our speed of innovation is incredible,” Rardin says. “We have invested a ton of capital into these products in the past two years. We’re releasing new functionality nearly every month. So we’re innovating very quickly.”
- Attention to every customer. Trella has been very selective in which health care verticals to support to ensure they are experts in those markets and able to provide outstanding customer success. In fact, every Trella customer has a customer success manager. “We’re interacting with our customers as frequently as daily and sharing industry-specific best practices to help them achieve their goals,” Rardin says.
In the end, Trella helps providers capitalize on the adage to “Work smarter, not harder,” because the data they deliver means that providers can proactively go after the right referral sources.
“Our offering allows our customers to understand where they are spending their time,” Rardin says. “And is that time actually resulting in an output, meaning an order referral? You’re able to recognize all revenue pretty quickly because you already have the relationships with those providers in the marketplace.”
This article is sponsored by Trella Health, which empowers providers from across the care continuum to work together, paving the way for healthier, more cost-effective outcomes. To learn more, visit trellahealth.com.