Increasing Reimbursement with Nursing Advantage

The Challenge

Sherrill House, a not-for-profit skilled nursing and rehabilitation center in the greater Boston area, strives to exceed standards of excellence while delivering care to the older adults it serves.

On a busy shift with multiple assessments happening in real time, details were sometimes missed during documentation. “The biggest thing I would say to my nurses is, ‘I know how hard you work, and I see the outcomes, but you’re not taking credit for what you do. Because if it’s not documented, it didn’t happen,’” shares Alessio Miniello, RN, Chief Clinical Officer at Sherrill House.

Additionally, customized resident assessments required time-consuming maintenance to stay in compliance with changes to regulatory requirements.

The Solution

Sherrill House chose Nursing Advantage as a solution to support nurses in more consistent, comprehensive assessments based on resident diagnoses.

Condition-specific clinical guidance within Nursing Advantage supports nursing staff by providing personalized, evidence-based actions to follow. This approach helps improve quality outcomes for residents while simultaneously guiding nurses through documenting the care provided.

Additionally, PointClickCare supports regulatory changes and clinical best practices by maintaining and updating the assessments, care guides, and alerts provided within Nursing Advantage. This saves skilled nursing facilities time otherwise spent updating assessments with each major regulatory change.

The Outcome

After implementing Nursing Advantage, Sherrill House’s nurses quickly realized that the guidance it provided was assisting them on multiple fronts. “Once they started using it, it wasn’t long before they were telling me ‘You just click through it so fast,’ or ‘I wouldn’t have thought to consider this intervention,’” says Miniello.

With Nursing Advantage, “they would say that it just prompted their memory, because of the guided suggestions that are changing in real time and offered to them on the screen while they do it.”

With more comprehensive documentation, Sherrill House saw a 19% increase in Medicare reimbursement within 120 days of launching Nursing Advantage. Equally notable was the impact Sherrill House observed in resident outcomes. Miniello states, “I do feel very confident that it had a lot to do with not only reimbursement, but also rehospitalization rate. How it impacted length of stay is this improved documentation, improved workflow, time was reallocated to those personal interactions with the patients, producing better outcomes, and so our patients were, in fact, meeting their goals in rehab sooner.”

As a result, Sherrill House also realized a 62% decrease in rehospitalization rate YoY pre- vs. post-launch, and a 35% decrease in length of stay for managed care, helping them meet their goals of achieving and sustaining excellence.

Learn More

If you’re interested in implementing Nursing Advantage to help your organization achieve results like those experienced by Sherrill House, click here for more details.