The post–acute care space requires continual evolvement as technology expands to address care setting needs and regulatory changes. In 2022, we published a blog that explored KLAS’ research with post–acute care at the time—since, KLAS has published multiple reports for post–acute care technology to showcase where customer satisfaction with their vendors stands.
This blog is an update on KLAS’ post–acute care research, highlighting the two most recent reports in this space for hospice and long-term care software solutions.
The Overall Post–Acute Care Market
Changes in the post–acute care space are needed whether HIT vendors or healthcare providers are ready for them or not. These changes are often due to additional technological capabilities and changing regulations. While cost and regulatory challenges are not unique to post–acute care, there are elements to this space that make these challenges more acute, including differences in reimbursement and severe financial restraints caused by the nature of post–acute care and the recent cybersecurity hack of Change Healthcare.
Additionally, organizations continue to face challenges around wage inflation for clinicians and nursing shortages, leading many to seek more from their HIT solutions in order to consolidate technology and save money. Another factor that has heavily influenced this space in recent years is acquisitions, such as WellSky acquiring Consolo and PointClickCare acquiring American HealthTech. Additionally, many private equity and venture capital firms have recently started investing in post–acute care facilities, creating an uptick in requests for financial analytics tools and insights.
Hospice Care HIT
Several vendors have made recent developments in order to better enhance their solutions for hospice users, specifically attempting to make the solutions more usable for clinicians and nurses to reduce burnout. Our recent Hospice 2024 report takes a look at what kind of progress these vendors have made and how that is or isn’t affecting customer satisfaction—the overall consensus across vendors is that not enough is being done.
The highest satisfaction score for a vendor’s ability to meet hospice-specific needs is a 7.4 out of 9 (MatrixCare), and the overall satisfaction scores for almost all vendors has decreased in the last three years (except for Homecare Homebase and WellSky Hospice & Palliative [Consolo] which went up about 1 point). Generally, respondents often feel like hospice is an afterthought to their HIT vendors and want more or improved end-user reporting and functionality that is tailored specifically to their end users’ workflows.
Integration is also critical to hospice agencies, as no matter how broad functionality is in a solution, end users will need to be able to access supplementary patient data from other solutions to ensure high-quality care. Read the report to see more specifics on which vendors have the highest customer satisfaction in their ability to support integration goals as well as where respondents are successfully integrating with third-party solutions.
Long-Term Care HIT
KLAS also recently published the Long-Term Care 2024 report, an update to previous reports to evaluate how vendors are responding to ongoing cost challenges and expanding their solution. Almost every vendor in this report saw a decrease in their interviewed customers’ perception of their realized value in the last three years, with the main exception being MatrixCare, who increased their value satisfaction score by reducing the number of ad hoc charges.
Ultimately, healthcare organizations are willing to invest in HIT solutions that will benefit their organizations and their patient care, but they want to ensure they are receiving value and that they can increase their profitability by using these solutions. (Check out the report for more specifics about where respondents are planning to increase their long-term care technology investments.) If their main long-term care EHR vendor does not provide the needed functionality at the value needed, then organizations will seek out third-party solutions to improve their workflow (such as with analytics). Long-term care vendors need to continue broadening their functionality to better meet their customers’ needs while still maintaining high value for the cost organizations are paying.
How Will Post–Acute Care Continue to Change?
While these spaces have changed in the last few years, long-term care and hospice will continue growing, likely with further evolution of analytics and more workflow solutions addressed by AI (mainly interoperability and workflow automation). Additionally, the energy is only going to continue growing for care coordination (i.e., rehospitalization risk scores), value-based care arrangements, patient referral management analytics, and point-of-care patient analytics—all seen by the energy in recent market acquisitions.
KLAS will continue monitoring these spaces to evaluate how any developments may or may not affect customer satisfaction. Read the recent Hospice and Long-Term Care reports (as well as the Home Health report published earlier this year) for more specifics on post–acute care HIT solutions.
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