HealthPRO Heritage adds enterprise partnership service

HealthPRO Heritage says its Enterprise Partnership can help improve an organization’s net economic performance and create solutions to the challenges providers face today.

The company said the program builds on the therapy provider’s 20-plus years of experience in the industry and the strength of diverse and dedicated resources.

Clinical experts develop and implement customized programs to answer the needs of local markets to drive referrals. Consultative guidance supports strategic admissions and accurate coding to optimize reimbursement, whereas proprietary clinical pathways control rehab costs as therapists provide quality person-centered care.

Dementia residents in LTC suffered outsized pandemic mortality spikes

Older adults with dementia, especially nursing home residents and minorities, had significantly higher mortality rates during the pandemic than peers without cognitive impairment, a study in JAMA Neurology found. 

Investigators compared mortality rates in pre-pandemic 2019 versus rates in 2020 using data from 53 million Medicare beneficiaries 65 and older. Study cohorts included people with and without Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia living in the community and people with and without dementia living in nursing homes. They believe healthcare disruption — and not the COVID-19 illness alone — may be to blame for excess deaths.

AI could shape future rehab therapy

Artificial intelligence trained to interpret the words therapists use could unlock important clues about more powerful and effective treatments, researchers are finding.

The combination could lead to more people getting and staying healthy, authors Charlotte Jee and Will Douglas Heaven reported in MIT Technology Review.

“The idea is to use natural-language processing to identify which parts of a conversation between therapist and client — which types of utterance and exchange — seem to be most effective at treating different disorders,” they explained.