What is the Home Health News Source?
“In-depth exploration and analysis of home care and hospice’s toughest problems” means that these five newsletters and the community blog behind them are a place to learn, discuss and help each other.
Medicare certified home care and hospice providers will immediately recognize the value of our reporting as government regulations are such a large part of their world. However, those reimbursed by Medicaid, insurance and patients themselves will find important news here as well.
Why am I doing this?
In my profession, I write about all of the technologies available to home care and hospice providers. Since my career path led me to home care in 1993, I have come to appreciate technology as a key to quality home care but I have also come to realize that, while home care is dependent upon technology, technology cannot solve every problem facing providers.
So I have created this site in order that you and I can explore some of these tough problems and exchange ideas that might bring important insight to the industry. I am happy you have found my site and I cordially invite you to stay and participate.
Warm regards,
Tim Rowan, Editor
About the Editor:
Tim Rowan, Editor/Owner of Home Health News Source
I am a Valley boy, born in beautiful downtown Burbank at St. Joseph’s Hospital, which is now part of the Providence system, and raised in the City of San Fernando. Today I live in Colorado Springs, having arrived through the circuitous route of under- and post-graduate work at a couple of Catholic colleges in Chicago, preceded by five years in a seminary that provided me an excellent education but failed to convince me of the joys of celibacy.
Writing and teaching were always passions. I pursued them in various forms until I found myself working as an instructor at a computer education firm. One of my clients happened to be a home care agency that was expanding and needed an IT Director. I jumped at the chance and filled the role from the height of home care’s Medicare glory days in the early 90’s through its IPS nadir in 1998.
Fate had sent me to a home care conference a month before eight of us were laid off that summer. There I met Tom Williams, widely regarded as home care’s leading software guru. By the end of the year, we had begun a 10-year collaboration that created home care’s trusted technology newsletter and afforded me the opportunity to learn at the feet of a master. From February of 1999 to Tom’s untimely passing in January 2009, we grew Home Care Automation Report from 350 subscribers to over 5,000.
Rather than fold up operations without his guidance, I decided to carry on Tom Williams’ legacy by expanding the scope of my research and writing. There is so much outside the strict parameters of technology that home care and hospice operators need and want to know. This site gives me the opportunity to report on many important topics in addition to home care technology.
This idea for this blog came from a friend who lives in a world that is constantly connected to the problems faced by today’s home care providers. With more than a little bit of nudging from that friend and others, here I am, at your service.
Home Health News Source already includes five topically unique newsletters, and will continue to grow. Locate the topic of interest to you, explore the articles and comments and feel free to add your own. Shenanigans of Medicare’s Recovery Audit Contractors will be treated in two places, “RAC Attack: Home Care” and “RAC Attack: Hospice.” “Re-hospitalization Stories” is where we will collect and share your frustrations with one of home care’s most nagging problems. “Home Care Tech Report” will carry on in the tradition Tom Williams and I started in 1999.
I hope you use our new site as a tool to explore the issues facing home care.
Please let me know of anything I can do to improve your experience.
Thank you,
Tim Rowan
editor@homehealthnews.org
