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Special to The Independent Home health and hospice services offered by Avera St. Anthony's Hospital will be unifying into a single agency called Avera@Home as of the New Year. Avera@Home offers the same dependable services by the same great people, said Barb Malmberg, department director of Avera@Home in O'Neill. This new structure makes us more efficient and gives us the ability to offer services to more people in more areas. This does not change how we care for our patients. The new organization repositions Avera's home health and hospice services to meet the changing demands for healthcare delivery. Healthcare reform requires better population health management, particularly for patients with chronic diseases. Demographics are driving where care is provided. These changes mean that home health and hospice care are now a central and growing piece in the healthcare delivery process. �Our goal is to make sure that patients have access to the services they require,� said Sandy Dieleman, Avera@Home CEO. �Home- and community-based services are an important part of healthcare. Today not everyone has access to these services and we are working to expand our services to meet this need.� Avera is responding to the changing demographics for the elderly population to provide quality care for the patients, access to services, remain independent in the home and create efficiencies that will sustain community based services as reimbursement for services continues to decline. Avera@Home has been created to combine all Avera home care programs under one umbrella. The intent is to provide community based services in Avera's 85 county service areas. The agencies will continue to provide the same services with the same staff and at the same locations. The result is that more non-clinical associated activities of an agency can be consolidated so that the direct providers of home care services can be in the community serving our patients. "Here in O�Neill everything is the same except its name. We will continue with our tradition of providing the highest quality of home care services," Malmberg said. According to the Avera staff, diseases of today that most impact a person's ability to care for themselves are chronic conditions. Staff require medications for medical management, frequent monitoring of health status and adaptations in their ability to care for self. Home-based care is clinically effective utilizing advanced technologies and helping to cost-effectively manage chronic diseases that account for 75 percent of the nation's healthcare spending. Yet, despite this low cost preferred option, the government has planned $12 billion in Medicare cuts to the industry over the next few years and recently the Administration recommended adding co-pays to home health benefits for the new beneficiaries starting in 2017. Avera believes home care improves the quality of life by enabling individuals to stay in the comfort and security of their own homes during times of illness, disability and recuperation. Home care maintains the patient�s dignity and independence, qualities that commonly are lost in the institutional settings. It offers a wide range of specialized services tailored to meet the needs of every individual on a personal provider-to-patient basis. It also reinforces and supplements informal care by educating the patient�s family members and friends about the care-giving process. Times have changed for the better in the sense of early detection and diagnosis, technology and treatment for diseases. Home care and hospice will most likely play a key role in the coming years. �Home care is not just the preferred choice for most patients, it's also the best bang for our health care dollars. It costs Medicare nearly $2,000 per day for typical hospital stay and $559 per day for a typical nursing home stay. Meanwhile home care costs just under $44 a day on an average,� according to the National Association for Home Care and Hospice web site http://www.nahc.org/. Millions of baby boomers are turning 65 and as this continues to happen the increase in the senior demographics is making Medicare and health care dollars more and more scarce. This is one of the reasons people are seeing a shift in healthcare moving from hospitals and nursing facilities toward in-home and community-based care. For more information about home care and hospice services in the O�Neill area call Avera@Home O�Neill at (402) 336-5296.
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