This article is brought to you by Trella Health. The article is based on an interview that took place during a virtual panel discussion with Jonas Fortenberry, Revenue Enablement Manager for Trella Health. The panel took place virtually on January 27, 2022. This is an excerpt from the session, which has been edited for length and clarity.

SNN: Thanks for joining us today for the virtual Reputation and Referral Summit. I’m a healthcare reporter here with Skilled Nursing News. Today, we’ll talk about Operational Success and Smarter Growth for Today’s Skilled Nursing Landscape. Before we begin, I wanted to thank our thought leadership sponsors, Trella Health and Zipline.

Jonas Fortenberry: We appreciate all you do for the industry and keeping folks informed. I’m happy to be here and part of this discussion. I’ve been with Trella for just over a year now, in the post-acute space, both on the sales and business development side. I have prior experience on the operational side with a home health, hospice, and private duty agency in Northeast Ohio where I worked for a few years as well.

For today’s discussion, I’ll provide a quick overview of Trella and a benchmark report we did on skilled nursing facilities growth priorities, and then discuss where agencies like yours should focus their priorities for 2022. Part of that discussion includes compelling messaging, targeting strategies, and we’ll dip into some customer success stories as well. Trella Health has been in the space for about six years and is the market leader in home health, hospice, and skilled nursing. We are a performance analytics company that focuses on growth and healthier outcomes for our customers.

Our mission is to provide valuable insights and meaningful data to use in referral partner conversations to help organizations grow. Not just from a census standpoint, but in terms of relationships and a focus on healthier outcomes. We have 100% of part A, B, and C claims from CMS. Last year, we acquired Medicare Advantage and commercial claims that now give us a collective data set that covers over 90% of lives, ages 65 plus in the U.S.

We do have one other announcement I’m sure a lot of folks may have heard, which is our recent acquisition of PlayMaker Health. With our comprehensive skill set and data and their industry-leading CRM for business development leaders, the plan is for our two organizations to provide the most comprehensive post-acute intelligence tool in the marketplace.

Now, let’s discuss our benchmark report and what skilled nursing facilities see as growth opportunities or their main priorities for 2022. The increase in admissions and referrals is number one. Especially important too is partnering with ACOs, DCEs, or other value-based care organizations, and increasing patients of a specific diagnostic category, which is something that’s newer and, I think, more uncharted territory.

SNN: I think that’s been a conversation in the overall healthcare space, but certainly post-acute care is moving more towards value-based care. I think COVID halted those conversations or really paused it, but we’re definitely curious to see kicking off a new year in 2022, how value-based care is going to integrate even more into the post-acute care space than it has ever before.

Fortenberry: A lot of focus is the home health and physician-based relationship. The skilled nursing facilities don’t necessarily have the strong opportunity to partner with ACOs. That’s something that drives us into the next category which is where do we focus? How can skilled nursing facility groups take advantage of value-based care organizations that are looking to have a skilled nursing facility partner with a physician that’s part of a group that can strengthen their care?

SNN: I think that a lot of skilled nursing facilities have felt left out of the conversation. I’m definitely curious to see if you think that they’re going to have more seats at the table moving forward in using value-based care discussions.

Fortenberry: A lot of the questions we get from customers is, where do we start? Knowing that we want to partner with value-based care organizations, where’s a manageable place to start to build a plan for 2022 and beyond?

The biggest thing is to understand your market potential. I know that’s an easy thing to say, but really gaining a clear understanding of market opportunity and having full visibility into all the competitors and referral sources in your market lets you understand your current relationships. I think the one thing we see with a lot of our customers is that they don’t have a clear picture and understanding what their current referral relationships are.

Having insight to ensure that you have the right people focused on the right markets, especially when there’s staffing shortages all around, not just on the nursing side, but in business development too. How do you focus and target the right places? The second point is to identify and engage, creating a unique target list based on where your organizations focus areas and working to educate providers on your value. Differentiating from competition is another area and really identifying those key market differentiators and areas of improvement.

Data is important to leverage that visualization to communicate to those providers about your value. Understanding what your special sauce or niche might be to differentiate from the competition and focus on those areas. Then, educating providers on the overall value of skilled nursing facilities. You’ve done a lot of articles about how people want to be in the home. We hear that more and more, and we know that, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a need for skilled nursing facilities.

It’s really focusing on educating those providers on the value of preventing rehospitalization and a better understanding of skilled nursing facilities- how they can leverage their services and how it can even be a better option than home health in some instances. It’s certainly a better avenue than no post-acute care, which is something we see a lot of where patients leave an acute setting with no post-acute instructions and the resulting rehospitalization rate, something a skilled nursing facility stay could have prevented.

Organizations cannot solely rely on relationships anymore. Everyone knows that the landscape of healthcare has changed and continues to change. Whether it’s ACOs and DCEs and other value-based care organizations, regardless, the emphasis is on patient outcomes. You need to be able to come to every conversation with metrics and specific data points using actual insights from your data and your EMR, not just gut reactions to guide conversations. You have to have an understanding of what’s happening in your market, and corresponding targeting strategies.

If the goal is purely admissions, focusing on physicians that are underutilizing care or are competitor affiliated organizations, then looking at diversifying your tactics in terms of diagnostic categories or marketing strategies.

SNN: Have you found the technology gap between skilled nursing facilities and hospitals has become a problem for some of the facilities in terms of trying to find these data points that you think are essential for them to be looking at now? How do you suggest that they bridge that?

Fortenberry: I think one of the main things we see is providers not having full access to the data that they think they do. This is where providers in the post-acute space, like skilled nursing facilities, can provide a tremendous value to those organizations, whether it’s a hospital, facility, or a physician group. Understanding and targeting them based on their patient population, speaking specifically to some of their performance metrics, with a data set like Trella can give you is super important. It’s something that is paramount to success because a lot of times they simply don’t have the right information.

Having something quick and tangible to access, which is something Trella does in our algorithms, gives you specific metrics to talk to an organization that is relevant to them. Underutilization is mentioned multiple times, which is one we see a lot in home health and hospice especially, but on the skilled nursing facility side, too. They may have a large share of patients that they’ve seen or recently seen who haven’t leveraged skilled nursing care despite potentially being eligible.

Obviously, this can happen because some patients don’t adhere, but many times it’s because they haven’t been identified during the care cycle for these services. That’s one thing that we look at and you can see again in the data set, both from a provider level or from a physician-level or a hospital-level is how many patients are being discharged with post-acute care instructions and what setting that is? How many are adhering to that? Then within 30 days of a post-acute discharge, how many patients are entering that care setting like a skilled nursing facility setting that did not receive instructions at discharge?

The number is much higher than you’d anticipate, especially for skilled nursing facilities. Understanding and being able to look at data and understand a patient pathway, for example, if someone that went from a hospital stay to home health and then went back to the hospital, where a skilled nursing facility stay would’ve impacted that. Being able to see that and see that patient pathway again, is meaningful data that skilled nursing facilities can have with hospitals and with physician groups to show where their value lies and how they can help prevent patients ending back in the hospital.

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity. To watch the full discussion on video, please visit:

Trella Health (formerly Excel Health) is a data-driven technology solution that empowers post-acute care providers and their referral sources to work together across the care continuum. Learn more at www.trellahealth.com.