State Association Partnership Program

2012 Keynote Presentations, Breakout Sessions, and Workshops

Ten keynote presentations on issues of critical interest to home care leaders. Each presentation has been extensively researched. Each includes insights from Fazzi Associates’ national studies, from our national consulting work, and from our various national benchmark services. And each is presented in a dynamic and fun manner by a nationally recognized home care leader.

The New Future of Home Care: Accountable Care Programs, Hospitalization Reduction, and New Alliances

Home care is moving into a new reality.  For some agencies, it will be a period of great opportunity.  For others, it will be a period of great risk.  The new health care reform initiatives are pushing all of health care to closer alignments.  In this high level presentation, learn the five major initiatives that are now underway.  Find out how hospitalization reduction is emerging as a key strategy for agencies.  Learn what insights have come from the largest study in the history of home care on best practices for reducing hospitalizations.  Get the four key components of home care’s new SafeSide™ Hospitalization Reduction Model.  Finally, learn what alliances are now emerging and the proven strategies that home care agencies can use to be a valued partner in these alliances.

Leadership, Leaders, and the Thirty-Day Challenge

There is one common factor found in every successful change effort in home care: a leader that makes it happen. Whether it is a senior executive, a mid-manager, a supervisor, or a line staff leader of an improvement effort, there are common traits found in all successful leaders. Learn the traits of the ideal leaders.  Why some behaviors hurt leaders.  Why consensus seeking is the ideal strategy for some change efforts and the absolute worst strategy for others.  The role of values and vision in leadership.  How the best leaders use a three-step process for introducing change and for generating excitement and buy-in.  The thirty-day challenge for becoming a leader and why it can work!  Most importantly, why home care needs people willing to step up to become of true value and change leaders in a field that is sacred.  A presentation by Dr. Bob Fazzi based on solid research and insights from over forty years working with leaders at all levels.

OASIS-C for Executives: A Program for Senior Managers of Home Care Agencies

OASIS-C for Executives is not a clinical program or a how-to-do it assessment program. This is a high level program designed to show senior leadership the new realities of OASIS-C, why it is so difficult for their clinicians, and what are the financial and quality implications of this new instrument. With over 80 changes and an array of new process measures, OASIS-C for Executives uses non-clinical jargon to explain what happened, what it means to agencies, and what best practice responses leadership can consider for improving the accuracy of clinician assessments and the quality and financial outcomes in their agency.

The Productivity Institute: Maximizing Productivity and Optimal Care Management

The Productivity Institute is a best practice program. Learn how leading agencies now measure productivity, what can be done to increase productivity while ensuring quality, and the five strategies for increasing productivity. Participants will also learn how productivity fits into the optimal care management model and how both are enhanced through the new Outcome Management System, the newest approach to managing clinical as well as administrative staff in the home care environment.

Inside Knowledge: Insights From the National State of the Home Care Industry Report

Health care reform is driving home care agencies to operate more efficiently, effectively and competitively. The National Home Care State of the Industry Study shows how leading agencies are doing it. Over 900 agency leaders were interviewed. Issues addressed included present and future strategies with technology, telehealth, use of smartphones, EMR, compensation, bonuses, liaisons, referrals, cost saving strategies, planning strategies, and best practice strategies for increasing quality and profitability. Includes best practice strategies for OASIS-C. This unique study segmented strategies by size of agencies, by auspices (hospital based versus hospital affiliated versus free standing), by legal status, and by location. Sponsored by BlackBerry® and co-sponsored by NAHC, Home Care Hospital Association of America, and Fazzi Associates, this dynamic presentation provides insights, strategies, and best practice options for thriving in the new health care and home care environment.

Home Care’s New Trilogy: CAHPS®, Quality, and Customer Service

Thanks to the new CMS mandated CAHPS survey, patient satisfaction, quality, and customer service have moved to the forefront of successful home care agency management. Learn why CAHPS will shape your future, what strategies lead to better quality outcomes, and what the role of customer service will be in patient satisfaction, home health quality and profitability. Get insights into the five measures that will be included in Home Health Compare and how to improve your performance with each of them. With over twenty-five years providing patient satisfaction and customer services and in reviewing the scores of millions of patients, Fazzi Associates will provide real life examples of what works, what doesn’t work, and what you can do immediately to improve your CAHPS scores.

Right Way/Wrong Way: The Right and Wrong Business and Operational Strategies for Succeeding in Today’s Home Care Environment

Learn the best practice results from the National 2008-2009 Best Practice Study. The goal was to learn the best strategies agencies used to for improving quality and financial outcomes. The study compared the strategies, successes, and failures of over 100 participating agencies against benchmark data from the nation’s only national operational, financial, and quality best practice service, BestWorks®. The result - an exciting presentation on what operational, clinical, staffing, and process strategies work, what doesn’t work and what agencies can do to improve their financial and quality outcomes. Also included will be findings, some painful, from over 100 operational reviews.

Future Trends/Future Options in Community Based Health Care

The future of health care will be in the community. It’s inevitable! New trends. New medical developments. New clinical technologies. New payment models. New demands by the demographic tidal wave of seniors. New implications – both positive and negative – to the future of home care. Future Trends/Future Options is a dynamic, fun and eye-opening session about the incredible future of home care and hospice and the exciting new business opportunities that are emerging.

The Leadership Dilemma: How to Market and Grow Your Company While Maintaining Exceptional Quality

It is a dilemma that every leader faces. How do you market and grow your organization without jeopardizing or undermining quality? What do leaders focus on? How does outcome management ensure success? What growth strategies work the best and what strategies threaten the very viability of an organization? In The Leadership Dilemma learn what the nation’s top home care leaders do to market and grow their organization, while still making quality outcomes the centerpiece of their growth strategies. A session on best practices for marketing, growing and managing your agency.

Strategic Challenges/Strategic Choices

There are changes coming to home care. The new OASIS C regulations. The new patient satisfaction mandated survey (CHAPS) from CMS. The expanded OIG investigations. The implications of an economy that has lost 33.8% of its stock value in 2008. For some these are threats; for others they are opportunities. Get the latest on the new challenges facing home care! Discover the strategies leading agencies are now initiating to protect themselves from challenges while positioning themselves to take advantage of others. This is a session filled with information, insights and most importantly, best practice strategies for 2009-2010.

Breakout Sessions

Combine with Keynote Presentations for Special Savings

SafeSide™ Hospitalization Reduction Program: Rationale, Design, and Strategies for Developing and Implementing SafeSide

The Delta Hospitalization Reduction Study was the largest study in the history of home care on best practices for reducing avoidable hospitalizations.  Nearly 800 agency leaders were interviewed.  Twenty-two best practices were identified.  And in the midst of the study, a new highly accountable, outcome oriented model emerged: SafeSide.  In this fast paced workshop, you will learn the rationale that serves as the foundation for SafeSide; the four key components, how your existing data can help you, the one thing you need to do in 48 hours to ensure the success of the program, why some of your practices may not be helping and might be hurting and most importantly, and the five key steps to developing the program.  You will leave this workshop knowing exactly what you need to do to design and implement this program in your agency.

Interdisciplinary Disease Management: Moving from Concept to Reality

Delivering care using a team approach has long been a strategy discussed in many home health agencies but can be a challenge to implement. What sounds good on paper can be quite different to integrate into daily practice. This session will provide real life examples of effective implementation of patient driven care management utilizing the strengths of the interdisciplinary team.

Home Care’s New Trilogy: CAHPS, Quality and Customer Service

Thanks to the new CMS mandated CAHPS survey, patient satisfaction, quality and customer service has moved to the forefront of successful home care agency management.  Learn why CAHPS will shape your future, what strategies lead to better quality outcomes and what the role of customer service will be in patient satisfaction, home health quality and profitability.  

The Five Pillars of Exceptional Agencies

This high level senior management presentation presents a strong and compelling overview of the five key operational components agency leaders must control and why controlling these components is critical to the future of every agency in the country. Includes benchmarks of agencies that have proven to be most successful at controlling these components and a systemic overview of the best practice strategies for implementing improvement efforts. More importantly, this dynamic presentation includes a sixth pillar; a pillar that national and international studies have shown to be the one fact that separates organizations that excel from their competitors. Can also be selected as a keynote.

Referrals, Referrals, Referrals: New Trends and New Options for Increasing Home Care Referrals

This innovative presentation includes insights gained from surveys of thousands of referral sources, physicians, discharge planners, etc. throughout the country. The Referrals, Referrals, Referrals presentation includes a broad range of new ideas and new insights gained from reviews of successful strategies being used by agencies throughout the country.

Whatever It Takes: The Total Customer Service Program

More and more agencies are recognizing that the best way to differentiate themselves from competitors is through exceptional customer service. Learn how a "real" customer service program can increase patient satisfaction and loyalty, generate more referrals and new sources of referrals and directly impact your ability to increase staff satisfaction, morale and retention. Get clear insights and proven strategies for developing a Total Customer Service Program. This is a home care and hospice specific program.

Lost or Found: Hidden Opportunities and Risks in Your Intake Department

Is your Intake Department helping you or hurting you? Do you measure your conversion rates? Are they above the national average of 90%? Are there lost opportunities – sometimes without anyone even knowing it? The Lost or Found workshop will help agencies identify the different roles of intake and how to maximize each one. Learn how to measure your conversion rate and how to isolate problem areas. Discover what we’ve found with our Mystery Shopping Service, including the number one reason agencies lose business and how easy it is to fix. Get proven strategies needed to help maximize the intake process and increase referrals now!

The Productivity Institute: A How to Do It Workshop

Since PPS has come on the scene, clinical productivity has gone through a number of significant transformations. Learn how leading agencies now measure productivity, what can be done to increase productivity while ensuring quality, and the five strategies for increasing productivity in the PPS environment. The Productivity Institute also includes a thorough overview of the new Outcome Management System, the newest approach to managing clinical as well as administrative staff in the home care environment.

Organizational Health: A Self-Diagnosis Workshop

Think your agency is in good shape? Do you know? Do you know how you compare to best practice agencies? Do you know your strengths? Weaknesses? Better yet, do you know what you need to do to improve? You will after you attend the Organizational Health Workshop. Get the insights and tools you need to assess your agency, benchmark it, and identify best practice strategies for improvement.

Insights from Home Care’s Marketing Roundtable

This is the single best workshop for learning what marketing leaders do to improve their marketing, referrals and referral source retention. Learn what hundreds of marketing leaders say and do. New strategies they are using. Special techniques they have. Problems they have faced and how they overcame them. Their plans for the future. Get proven insights and strategies that you can immediately use in your agency.

Half and Full Day Workshops

Stand Alone Workshops - also Work as Pre-Conference Sessions

Management Workshops

Supervision Plus

A complete supervisory management training. Participants learn how to accurately assess the skill and motivation level of each employee and how to target their supervision in order to maximize employee motivation, commitment and retention. The sessions also provide participants with concrete skills for dealing with their most challenging employees. Program is based on Dr. Robert Fazzi's highly acclaimed book, Management Plus, published by McGraw Hill and named as a Main Selection of Fortune Magazine's Book of the Month Club. Half or Full Day Workshop

Whatever It Takes: The Total Customer Service Program

More and more agencies are recognizing that the best way to differentiate themselves from competitors is through exceptional customer service. Learn how a "real" customer service program can increase patient satisfaction and loyalty, generate more referrals and new sources of referrals, and directly impact your ability to increase staff satisfaction, morale, and retention. Get clear insights and proven strategies for developing a Total Customer Service Program. This is a home care and hospice specific program. Half or Full Day Workshop

Clinical Workshops

Therapy in 2012: Utilization, Documentation, and PPS

The Senate Finance Committee Report and subsequent Wall Street Journal article have made it clear that significant concerns remain about therapy utilization in home health. Many anticipate increased scrutiny of therapy documentation and practice patterns beyond what has already been seen. This interactive workshop will teach agencies objective ways to assess which patients should be referred to therapy while managing the challenges of staffing. In addition, key areas of therapy documentation will be discussed to ensure compliance with the standards set for PPS 2012 and beyond.  Sample records will be analyzed for real life application of the information provided.

So You Think You Know OASIS

This is the single best “how to do it” training on OASIS-C for nurses and therapists!  With national data from Fazzi’s OASIS-C Skills Assessment Testing and recommendations from OASIS experts involved with the National OASIS-C Best Practices Project, we’ve identified the key areas where clinicians need training the most.  The result…  a training that eliminates the guesswork and gets right to the heart of what clinicians need to know to achieve stronger and more accurate quality and financial results.  Presented in an exciting and highly interactive process by nationally accredited trainers.

OASIS-C: Connecting Assessments and Care

With the quarterly published OASIS Q&As come new challenges.  Fazzi’s OASIS Skills Assessment Testing of over 10,000 clinicians has discovered that some of the most frequently missed items relate to updated Q&As.  Even clinicians who feel they are up to date with the most recent training can easily fall behind if they aren’t ahead of the game.  If you haven’t attended an OASIS training session in a year, it is time to update.  In this interactive full day session, learn not only how to answer OASIS items correctly using the latest CMS guidance, but also how to critically think and use the data and clinical findings in care planning.

OASIS-C for Therapists

OASIS-C presents therapists with some unique challenges and new requirements, many of which have not been part of therapist core competencies and responsibilities.  This program focuses on the new demands for therapists and provides in-depth insights into best practices for dealing with these new realities.  This workshop includes insights from the National OASIS-C Best Practices Project related to therapy

Managing Rehabilitation as a Non-Therapist: Bridging the Gap

This highly interactive session provides supervisors with the field tested tools they need to help optimize their Therapy Program. Learn proven recruitment and retention strategies targeted toward therapists while discovering the most common obstacles non-therapist supervisors encounter when managing a rehabilitation team. This session combined with a half day session for therapists makes for a perfect full day of training.

Home Sweet Home: Home Health’s Baby Boom

An ever increasing number of consumers are looking for home-based options for care and this is expected to grow as the baby boomers continue to cross over age 65. Physical therapists in this area of practice are expected to manage medically complex patients and participate in data collection that will impact the provision of care both now and in the future. This workshop will discuss the impact of OASIS, M0825, therapy utilization and scope of practice while exploring the evolution of access to home health therapy services.

This is Not a Drill: Protecting Agency Revenue with Defensible Therapy Documentation

The findings of recent audit activity have called into question the medical necessity of therapy visits. Being able to support “reasonable and necessary” is now a key part of answering M0826 correctly. This session will focus on therapy documentation in order to support visits and improve revenue retention. The workshop will also discuss monitoring activities agencies need to consider to prevent therapy down codes. 

All clinical workshops can be scheduled as a single half day workshop or combined for a full day session. Target audience includes rehabilitation supervisors, clinical supervisors, case managers, quality improvement managers, physical therapists, occupational therapists, hospice staff … anyone involved with therapy in home care.

To schedule a presentation or workshop, contact Lindsay Doak at 413-584-5300.