Hospital readmissions place a large burden on the healthcare system. Each year, hospital readmissions cost payors ~$40B in disbursements and hospitals ~$560M in penalties alone. Many hospital readmissions are avoidable, and there has been an increased focus on reducing hospital readmissions to improve patient outcomes and reduce costs.
For example, the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) is a Medicare value-based purchasing program that “encourages hospitals to improve communication and care coordination to better engage patients and caregivers in discharge plans and, in turn, reduce avoidable readmissions.” As can be seen in the HRRP’s mission, care coordination is a key consideration in improving outcomes and reducing readmissions. The care coordination market, which seeks to minimize the number of avoidable hospital readmissions, is large and growing.
Solution
Watershed Health is a community-wide care collaboration platform which connects clinical and non-clinical care teams to facilitate communication, streamline the exchange of data and improve care management. For this reason, Watershed is an optimal tool in the post-acute environment where it is used to manage the hand-offs between acute and post-acute care providers, enabling better continuity of care and sharing of data (including around the social determinants of health) to reduce readmissions and improve outcomes for patients. Specific stakeholders include hospitals, medical transportation providers, home health, in-patient rehab, and skilled-nursing facilities. Watershed interfaces with any electronic health record (EHR) through a simple, universal connector to create real-time data exchange between the various involved stakeholders (acute and post-acute care providers). The platform improves care coordination and reduces readmissions, thereby improving health outcomes, enables transparency and optimizes post-acute care networks.
Why We Invested
Whereas existing solutions simply collect health data, Watershed takes into consideration the needs of various stakeholders to continuously measure provider collaboration and patient outcomes. As a next generation platform, Watershed is designed for all providers in both acute care settings (hospitals and health systems) and post-acute care settings (including home health, in-patient rehab, skilled-nursing facilities) to drive improved outcomes for patients and cost reductions for health plans. Watershed is directly driving impact by supporting the transition to value based care. The platform aggregates member data and gives providers real time insights to manage care transitions in order to transition patients from acute care centers back into their communities. Watershed gives providers actionable insights needed to act in real time and the tools to collaborate across care settings to improve patient outcomes.
Watershed’s leadership team consists of healthcare experts with longstanding experience in their respective fields and strong industry networks that will prove useful in Watershed’s growth. The team has specific expertise on the transition to value based care, sales executives with experience scaling similar models and physicians with first hand knowledge of the patient journey and the unmet needs in this space. The team complements one another and each brings a unique set of skills and experiences that will help the company through its next phase of growth.
Impact
Watershed’s referral management and data & analytics platform drives better patient outcomes.
As an example, Watershed’s platform helped one hospice agency reduce the time between hospital discharge and hospice intake from 36 hours to 5 hours, resulting in a drastic reduction in 30-day readmission rate from 10.6% to 2.8%.
One of Watershed’s initial clients experienced a sustained decline in the 30-day hospital readmission rate: before Watershed, the hospital readmission rate in the region was approximately 18%. After a two-year rollout and expansion period, hospital readmission has dropped to between 9% and 11%.
Watershed has a unique ability to directly impact patient outcomes by improving care transitions and therefore reducing readmissions rates. Watershed has a significant amount of data and metrics that it aggregates on a regular basis which will prove helpful in better understanding how Watershed drives improved outcomes and lowers the cost of care.