Dr Barbara McAneny on How the COME HOME Model Helps Cut Hospitalization Rates

The main value of the COME HOME model for oncology practices is that it can help reduce hospitalization rates, leading to better quality of life for patients and clinicians, according to Barbara McAneny, MD, chief medical officer of New Mexico Oncology Hematology Consultants.

Transcript (slightly modified)

Are the oncology practices using COME HOME better equipped to fulfill requirements for the Quality Payment Program?

I believe that that is the main value of COME HOME. The processes that we’ve put in place with the triage pathways, where we give nurses the power of the schedule and a decision support tool to be able to make sure that they’re making the decisions that their physicians would want made, getting patients into the office for same-day visits, that’s what worked in COME HOME to cut down hospitalization rates.

Patients do better when they’re not in the hospital. Every time a patient goes into the hospital, they come out just a little less quality of life than they went in. They’re just not as strong or they got a bad infection or something else happened. So by keeping patients out of the hospital, we keep them healthier, which is the main goal, but we also save that money. That’s the low-hanging fruit.

The processes we created with COME HOME have allowed us to do multiple same-day visits and in my practice, we’ve cut our hospital admissions by over half, and that’s significant. It’s also significant not only for patient quality of life but for physician quality of life. If I don’t have so many people to round on in the hospital before I go to the office to do the day’s work, I can manage them much more easily.