Digging Into Post–Acute Care Technology Research

If you ask healthcare providers in the acute care world who KLAS is, people are often familiar with who we are and the research we provide. However, when it comes to the post–acute care world, many people have yet to learn about us, so we know that in some ways our work is just beginning. As we continue to learn more about the vendors in the space, KLAS recognizes so many needed opportunities to dig deeper into the world of post–acute care technology.   

We are making some strides in researching post–acute care that we hope will make a difference for the patients who receive care, the healthcare providers who give it, and the vendors who are working to provide the best technologies to aid healthcare providers in their work. I’ll share a few of those below as well as some projects in the works that we need more customer feedback on.

KLAS’ Current Breakdown of Post–Acute Care

KLAS breaks post–acute care into the following two groups: facilities-based and home-based post–acute care. Creating these groups puts together segments that have similar care settings and workflows. The following are market segments in each of these areas, with those that KLAS currently has data for shown in bold type.

Facilities based: skilled nursing facilities in long-term care, assisted living/memory care, independent living, inpatient rehab/specialty hospitals, and long-term acute care hospitals.

Home based: home health, hospice, private duty nursing/personal care services, palliative care, home infusion/specialty pharmacy, and hospital-at-home technology.

We are also opening or expanding research for care coordination, clinical decision support, patient care assessments, post–acute care analytics, interoperability, scheduling, and secure messaging.

We are also considering opening home infusion and home medical equipment (HME)/durable medical equipment (DME).

Top Vendors in Skilled Nursing Facilities

KLAS is close to doing a report that will highlight the five largest long-term care vendors, which are PointClickCare, MatrixCare, Netsmart, CPSI/American HealthTech, and Experience Care.

PointClickCare is number one in market share and has won Best in KLAS for the last several years. They are a high-performing vendor. MatrixCare, a ResMed company, is also a high-performing vendor and a previous Best in KLAS winner. The difference between PointClickCare and MatrixCare is the way they have grown; PointClickCare has grown their EHR platform more organically, while ResMed has acquired several solutions over the years, including MatrixCare and Brightree. In terms of market share, Netsmart is the next best vendor. They are followed by CPSI/American HealthTech. Finally, there is Experience Care, which used to be known by several different names including Keane, NTT Data, and Cantata.

I will mention briefly that Epic, Cerner, and MEDITECH also have post–acute long-term care solutions. But, compared to these top five vendors, they represent a very small piece of the post–acute care landscape because only about 5% of the nursing homes out there are hospital owned.

Areas We’re Researching

We have several market segments we’re actively working on to bring more insights to healthcare providers. These include the following:

• Assisted Living and Memory Care. We just added this segment on our website with two vendors, PointClickCare and ECP, with a goal to get customer perspectives on Yardi, Eldermark, and MatrixCare. If you use them in your facility, we want to hear about your candid experience. We are also exploring vendors and use cases in independent living.
• Home Health. Our data represents the large end of the market. Homecare Homebase has been and still is the primary vendor of choice for the largest agencies. If you look at the top 20 largest home health agencies in the country, Homecare Homebase has almost all of them as their customers. They still are recognized as having the most robust functionality in terms of a home health solution. However, their customer experience scores have been dropping year over year for some time. Theoretically, they are potentially opening the door for other vendors to better meet the needs of these large home health agencies, but no vendor has been able to prove they are capable of doing what Homecare Homebase’s solution does. If you are using Axxess, Alora, Complia Health, Cradle Solution, Data Soft Logic, Delta, KanTime, Netsmart myUnity, Net Health (Casamba), or other home health EHRs, we want to hear from you. 
• Hospice. We are expanding our research in the hospice market segment. We want to continue to do more research in this area. If you use a vendor for hospice, especially a vendor we don’t already have data on, please reach out to us.
• Private Duty Nursing—Personal Care Services. We combined these two service lines but may break them out in the future. We would love any additional customer feedback, whether it be about AlayaCare, AxisCare, WellSky (ClearCare), or another vendor.
• Hospital at Home. In a recent KLAS report, 59 vendors were mentioned by healthcare providers who do remote patient monitoring, a core component of hospital at home. So far, we have published a health-at-home whitepaper and a remote patient monitoring report. If you have a health-at-home program, we’d like to talk to you about which vendors you’re utilizing.

Reports to Watch For

We are currently working on a post–acute care perception report that addresses both facilities-based and home-based care. As part of the research, we’re asking providers what their top three challenges or opportunities are now or in the future. We also ask which vendors, services, and/or solutions they utilize to help with the challenges they listed. We hope to capture a whole new set of vendors that we don't currently watch.

We just published our annual home health report. It highlights home health vendors who are serving the large end of the independent home health market and the hospital-owned agencies and how those vendors are performing.

Further in the Future

As we continue to work on post–acute care at KLAS, I invite anyone working in the post–acute area to engage with the insights we currently have. Please reach out to me if you have any questions or if you want to add your anonymous experiences to the research. Further insights into any of these spaces could be extremely helpful for both you and your peers in the post–acute care world.