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Demonstrate Your Value: VNAA Blueprint for Excellence Gives You the Tools

“How are you doing?”

For Visiting Nurse Associations of America members, this isn’t a conversational gambit. Our professionals neither want nor expect a pat “Fine, thanks. And you?”

The VNAA Blueprint for Excellence is a free web-based resource for workforce training and new skill development that promotes quality improvement in home health care practice and care transitions. It features operational best practice guidance for home health professionals and everyone else who has a stake in improving care transitions: other health care providers, payers and policymakers. It also provides valuable tools for organizations to standardize key practices and demonstrate their value to policymakers and payers, and offers guidance to evaluate and measure high-quality home care services.

t lets you powerfully answer “How are you doing?” In this era of increased scrutiny, you can expect to hear some version of that question from many payers and policymakers who, unfortunately, have an outdated view of home health. With the VNAA Blueprint at hand, you’ll be able to correct misperceptions and fill knowledge gaps. We know home health care both lowers the cost of care and improves outcomes.[1] Now, via the VNAA Blueprint’s best practices, we can demonstrate how we accomplish that.

Home health care requires highly skilled individuals to deliver all the services in the home care process; using the VNAA Blueprint for Excellence will both ensure and demonstrate delivery of consistent, high-quality care across the organization.

It is our pleasure and our obligation to share this resource with the larger health care community. Frankly, we are the only ones who can do it. We have the experience. We have the evidence. We have the people. We have the tools. We are the voice for evidence-based, high-quality, efficient home health care providers.

I’m thrilled to be part of this process, and in coming months we’ll be introducing you to more of the ins-and-outs of the VNAA Blueprint. After you’ve looked it at it, let me know what you think. Or call one of our experts for more guidance. We built this for you and relied on your expertise and leadership. Ultimately, however, we built this important tool for the patients and families you serve.

So how will you be doing? I hope you’ll agree, exceptionally well. And even better once you incorporate the VNAA Blueprint into your practice.

[1] Home – The Best Place for Health Care: A positioning statement from The Joint Commission on the state of the home care industry (2011), citing the following: Barrett, DL, et al. The Gatekeeper Program. Proactive identification and case management of at-risk older adults prevents nursing home placement, saving healthcare dollars a program evaluation. Home Healthcare Nurse. March 2010;28(3):191-197; Leftwich Beales, J, and Edes, T. Veteran’s Affairs home based primary care. Clinics in Geriatric Medicine 25(2009)149–154; Leff, B, et al. Comparison of functional outcomes associated with hospital at home care and traditional acute hospital care. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. February 2009;57(2):273-278; Counsell, SR, et al. Geriatric care management for low-income seniors. Journal of the American Medical Association. 2007;298(22):2623-2633.

Comments

By: Judy PetersonOn: 09/24/2013 14:23:47

This sounds very exciting! I’m looking forward to seeing the Blueprint. We are in the middle of strategic planning so this is perfect timing for my organization!

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