Providers On Biden’s Executive Order, Home-Based Care ‘Drumbeat That Won’t Be Ignored’

Home Health Care News | By Andrew Donlan
 
The Biden administration has made mention of home-based care regularly and intentionally during its tenure in the White House. It did so again [last month] this time through 50-plus directives for government agencies, many of which were home care-related. 
 
Though still just directives, the sitting president making this sweeping of an executive order focused on senior care – in part – is worth plenty of weight. 
 
Home- and community-based care (HCBS) providers believe there will be short- and long-term effects of the directives, as well as tangible and intangible results. 
 
“There’s certainly some symbolism in there that is favorable,” Darby Anderson, chief strategy officer for Addus Homecare Corporation (Nasdaq: ADUS), told Home Health Care News. “It certainly puts a greater wind at our backs, shining a spotlight on home- and community-based services and the overarching caregiver issues. And that’s very good.”
 
The Frisco, Texas-based Addus is an at-home care provider with a heavy focus on Medicaid-driven HCBS. The company has over 200 locations across 22 states.
 
Broadly, the directives from the White House included: a path for more home-based care availability for veterans, of the personal care and primary care variety; a path to uplift the caregiver workforce, utilizing Medicaid funds to do so; and further support for the concept of self-directed care.
 
“There’s real concrete actions that [President Biden] has put into this executive order that are directed at different parts of of the government,” Anderson continued. “We’ll have to see how those are implemented at the end of the day. But there could be some real concrete improvements, hopefully to the services we provide and for the workers in [this space].” 

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The following excerpts were taken by HHAC of pertinent Executive actions taken last week and as described in a White House Fact Sheet:

• Improve access to home-based care for veterans. VA is directed to consider expanding its Veteran Directed Care program to all 172 VA Medical Centers by the end of Fiscal Year 2024. This program provides veterans with a budget to hire personal care assistance including from family members. VA will also consider piloting a new self-directed care program in no fewer than 5 new sites that provides veterans with a budget for personal care assistance while reducing administration burdens related to managing care. Further, VA will consider adding 75 new interdisciplinary teams to its Home-Based Primary Care program to serve an additional 5,600 veterans in their homes.

• Enhance job quality for long-term care workers.  To advance the President’s long-term care priorities, the Executive Order directs HHS to consider issuing several regulations and guidance documents to improve the quality of home care jobs, including by leveraging Medicaid funding to ensure there are enough home care workers to provide care to seniors and people with disabilities enrolled in Medicaid, as well as build on the minimum staffing standards for nursing homes and condition a portion of Medicare payments on how well a nursing home retains workers.

• Support family caregivers. To provide greater support to family caregivers, the Executive Order directs HHS to consider testing a new dementia care model that will include support for respite care (short-term help to give a primary family caregiver a break) and make it easier for family caregivers to access Medicare beneficiary information and provide more support to family caregivers during the hospital discharge planning process. Additionally, VA will consider expanding access to the Program of Comprehensive Assistance for Family Caregivers and provide more mental health support for caregivers enrolled in that program. These actions build on the 2022 National Strategy to Support Caregivers.

• Advance domestic workers’ rights. Care workers should be supported, valued, and fairly compensated, and care workers should have the free and fair choice to join a union. In particular, domestic workers providing care for our loved ones are often underpaid and subject to discrimination and abuse. To provide greater protection for these workers, the Department of Labor will publish a sample employment agreement so domestic child care and long-term care workers and their employers can ensure both parties better understand their rights and responsibilities.

Adult COVID-19 Core Outcome Measures Survey

The Cross Section/Academy COVID-19 Core Outcome Measures Task Force is revisiting the current COVID-19 Core Outcome Measure recommendations. Please help us by taking a brief survey so that we can learn more about the implementation of the COVID-19 Core Outcome Measures in the clinic and what other tests and measures you are utilizing with this population.  The survey will remain open until 5/15/23. Thank you for your help!

Click here to take the survey: https://samuelmerritt.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_78JkPzxEFp2Rtdk

Participate in a Study Exploring Imposter Phenomenon in Physical Therapy

Anna Miller is a third year Doctor of Physical Therapy Student at The George Washington University, and is working with Dr. Marisa Birkmeier and Dr. Matthew Garber on a research study investigating Impostor Phenomenon in the physical therapy profession. 

The purposes of this study are to investigate the prevalence of Impostor Phenomenon (IP) and the demographic factors that may contribute to developing feelings of IP in physical therapist students (SPTs), physical therapists (PTs), physical therapist assistant students (SPTA’s), and physical therapist assistants (PTA’s) across the country.

IP occurs when high achieving individuals have a pervasive sense of self-doubt combined with fear of being exposed as a fraud, despite objective measures of success. While prevalence and demographic factors that contribute to developing feelings of IP have been formally investigated in medical students, resident physicians, and surgeons, the research regarding IP in the physical therapy profession is limited to personal stories, case studies, and blog posts.

Your participation in this study is completely voluntary and your data will remain confidential. Choosing to participate or abstaining from participating in this study will not negatively impact your current role or professional status. There is no financial renumeration for your participation. All data collected will be securely stored with restricted access to the research team. We will use the synthesized results to help bring awareness of the prevalence of IP to physical therapy programs and employers to allow them to address it instead of leaving it untreated.

If you are interested in participating in the study, click here: https://smhsgwu.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eerfmKUaNIAsvMa

Should you have any questions, please reach out directly to the principal investigator via email at [email protected] or Anna Miller via email at [email protected].

The Potential Risks of ChatGPT and Other Generative AI

JDSpura | By Baker Hostetler

“Shall we play a game?” Those innocuous words “spoken” by Matthew Broderick’s computer in John Badham’s sci-fi techno-thriller War Games stunned audiences at the time. A computer that could “talk” and “think” and engage in conversation?!? This was the height of science fiction. Well, with the recent release of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, specifically in the form of ChatGPT and other predictive natural language processing (NLP) algorithms, science fiction has once again become reality.

Companies from Microsoft to Google and Instacart to Kayak have begun to incorporate and build upon this technology, originally developed by OpenAI. These tools can be incredibly beneficial to businesses, but they also carry risks.

Before we dive in to how generative AI can assist brands and companies, let’s first peel back the layers and understand – at a basic level – what ChatGPT is.

ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer. Let’s break that down:

• Chat refers to the interface that allows for interaction with the model using natural language prompts.
• Generative refers to a category of AI model that produces new output based on a given input. In practice this means that the “input” of a user query can generate the “output” of text, images, and audio answers.
• Pre-trained refers to the fact that the model has already been trained on a vast data set to teach it to predict the next word in a given sequence.
• Transformer refers to the architecture of the neural network (machine learning algorithms) upon which ChatGPT is based. It is this architecture that allows the computer to process natural language.

Importantly, ChatGPT and other generative AI are not omniscient; they cannot think, understand, or feel. They are merely software – lines of computer code – programmed to generate natural language replies in response to text and image prompts. They work by predicting the next word in a given text string based on patterns “learned” from the data on which they have been trained.

In late March, OpenAI released an API (application programming interface) to select businesses to allow them to incorporate the AI technology into their own websites and apps via plugins. Using these plugins, brands have been able to harness the power of ChatGPT to help consumers book travel, make restaurant reservations, and create curated product recommendations.

Currently, the ChatGPT plugins have been tasked with relatively basic functions – essentially providing high-level search tools in the form of an interactive chatbot. See, for example, the video Expedia released on Twitter to show how its ChatGPT plugin operates.

Brands have also begun to use generative AI tools to help with:

• Coding – generating and building source code and analyzing mistakes within the code
• Content Creation – generating blog posts, social media posts, targeted email campaigns and video scripts
• Data Analysis – analyzing large data sets and synthesizing the information into easily digestible bullet points
• Market Research – generating a list of key players in any industry along with products and services
• Product Descriptions – generating bulk descriptions for e-commerce sites where product catalogs are frequently updated
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – generating copy that includes keywords and meta descriptions that search engines can look for when ranking pages

ChatGPT and other generative AI tools come with risks, and any business use of them should be done carefully and cautiously.

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