Humana Imposed Waste at Kindred Hospice

Strange Tony,

Humana led a study on healthcare waste while imposing the same on our hospice.  News reports indicated:

Researchers from Humana Inc. (HUM) and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine estimated the cost of waste in the United States (U.S.) health system. The study found that approximately 25 percent of health care spending can be characterized as waste – between $760 billion and $935 billion annually.

I have directly experienced Humana's wasteful management at our hospice.  Our complex payroll function within Homecare Homebase wastes numerous hours for employees wishing to be paid accurately for their work.

Every pay period the system does what used to be called a time and motion study.  Each employee must account for their time down to the minute.  Because the system won't allow you to start the next segment with the previous segment's ending time, an employee loses that minute.  At the end of the day the system could've robbed an employee of ten to fifteen minutes of actual worked time.

The robbery gets worse when Homecare Homebase's mileage reimbursement system only automatically pays for the trip to see the patient.  For an employee to be paid for their return trip to the office they must manually enter that into the mileage system.

Management did not train staff on the time or mileage system under Homecare Homebase and many employees were shorted as a result.  Five months after going live management offered to bring someone in to train staff on both functions.  Staff agreed that would be helpful.  It hasn't happened to date and I doubt it will.

Humana believes Kindred at Home will help reduce waste in its Medicare Advantage population.  My experience is they imposed significant waste.  It used to take 10-15 minutes to input worked hours.  It now takes two hours per pay period.  That's just to roll the dice and see if management will approve the submissions for payment.  More time is needed to study the check and find discrepancies (if shorted).

Homecare Homebase is a nightmare in complexity for employees wanting to be paid fairly for hours worked and miles driven.  I do not understand how hours worked in a just closed pay period can not be paid and added to a month that has long gone by.  That happened frequently at our hospice.

Another bureaucratic time waster is scheduling every visit.  This works fine for Home Health but makes no sense for hospice.  On call and regular staff wasted hours waiting for management to add the visit and push an assignment.   This also happened with our nurse practitioners needing to do face-to-face visits.  We look bad when a nurse practitioner travels to do a face-to-face visit in a facility and there is no visit note for them to complete.  It becomes a paper visit or a redo.  

Humana's study on administrative waste applies to our hospice.  It's ironic that Humana imposed the wasteful system after buying our hospice in July 2018.   Forgive them Lord, they know not what they do.  Or do they?  Lord, forgive them anyway.

Anonymous