Kara Health’s Mid-2019 Update

An Amazing Q2
Kara-Health’s-Mid-2019-Update
Technology

I’m excited to share news of our most recent achievements. At Kara Health, each of our innovations directly serves the pillars of our mission, to provide great patient care, a great patient experience, and be invaluable assets to our partners in healthcare.

One of our principles is to innovate where it moves the needle. In Q2 of this year, we did exactly that. Not only did we achieve our best numbers to date, but the recent rollout of our new model for patient care and supporting automations will continue to foster future success.

Kara Health’s Second Quarter Report

We’re proud to announce that we performed extremely well on many of our KPIs in the second quarter of 2019. Two KPIs in particular are worth sharing. For our chronic disease management, supportive care, and palliative care service lines, our hospitalization rate was just 0.5% and our ER utilization rate was just 0.2%. These are not self-reported numbers but instead reported by our health plan partners, who have a complete dataset of all claims from providers.

These exciting new milestones, our best numbers to date, represent significant cost savings for our health plan partners, and is indicative of a more comfortable at-home experience for our patients. We feel really fortunate to operate in a space where there are no losers, only winners:

  1. Patients are reporting higher satisfaction and saving significant out-of-pocket costs by avoiding trips to the ER and hospital.
  2. Payers are saving costs on the 5% of members who account for 50% of all healthcare spending.
  3. Kara gets the satisfaction of being a value-add to both ends (patient and payer) of the healthcare continuum.

As the U.S. population grows older, home-based care offers a solution for health plans, health systems, physician groups, and a variety of ecosystem players. National statistics show patients receiving care in the home report higher satisfaction, minimize their own out-of-pocket expenses, and spend less time in the ER and inpatient settings.

A New Patient Concierge Model at Kara Health

At Kara Health we go above & beyond to provide excellent care to our patients. Of our six guiding principles, the first is to provide excellent patient care. More patients are choosing home-based care not only for financial reasons, but for improvements in quality of life.

Kara Health’s new Patient Concierge Model provides high-quality home-based care by ensuring we are addressing each of our patient’s needs. A dedicated Patient Concierge is assigned to each patient to coordinate his/her care. The Concierge plays an important role in aiding communication between the patient, family members, and the clinical care team.

The sixth of our guiding principles is be empathic. By investing in communication, we ensure all stakeholders are on the same page and achieve positive health outcomes by leveraging human compassion together with data.

Engineering Automations to Enhance Patient Care

At Kara Health, we’re relentless about innovating where it moves the needle so we focus on building and using technology that augments patient care delivery. By automating where possible, the Patient Concierge and Clinician Teams are free to put their energy where it’s most effective — one-on-one patient interaction. Our latest F&D automation, or Frequency & Duration, reduces human error, tracks changes in patient acuity levels, and frees our Concierge Team to spend less time scheduling, and more time being of service.

Kara F&D™ is powered by our proprietary algorithm developed to determine how often each clinician type should be seeing each patient. By detecting what type of visit was completed, and the acuity level for the patient, the algorithm’s script automatically recalculates the deadline for the next visit.

By auto calculating deadlines and storing them, Kara Health removes the human error in tracking F&D’s. Moreover, acuity level changes are immediately detected and trigger automatic follow up cases. By removing the manual process of involving the Concierge Team in calculating deadlines and visit schedules, they are free to spend more time with patients and families.

This innovation works across all clinician types and ensures that errors are minimized, no stone is left unturned and every patient is receiving the proper amount of attention.

Looking Forward at Kara Health

We’re just getting started at Kara Health. So far, 2019 has given us the opportunity to serve a growing patient population and make a significant difference in reducing ER visits and hospitalizations. Our engineering team continues to roll out automations and utilize our data to further hone operations and build upon this success.

We are building a lot more stuff in Q3 that we are excited to share with you in the future. Stay on top of it and stay in touch by subscribing below.

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