Visiting Nurse Services of Connecticut

Visiting Nurse Services of Connecticut (VNS) is a not-for-profit provider of home healthcare services. We provide a comprehensive range of services to meet patient needs including: skilled nursing; occupational, physical and speech therapy; palliative and hospice care; and home health aides. In addition, our clinical staff includes advanced credentialed nurses with specialized training to address complex patient needs.
Our organization objectives include: to assist patients in attaining their optimal health outcomes; to provide dignified and compassionate care for the terminally ill; and to provide access to vital home healthcare services for uninsured and underinsured patients who may not have other accessible care options.

We endeavor to meet our patient-centric philosophy of care by recruiting and appropriately training qualified staff; adopting and implementing best-practice care delivery protocols; and by providing care-delivery staff with the resources and technology capabilities to deliver best practice care. We have a strong clinical management team to ensure adherence and compliance to evidence-supported care protocols. We have a strong commitment to quality reviews and process improvement and continuously assess our outcomes to identify improvement opportunities. We assess our documented patient outcomes against national, regional and peer-group benchmarks to identify any significant variances.
We have a robust and inclusive referral network to ensure all residents, particularly the underinsured and uninsured, have access to quality home healthcare services during their time of need.
We maintain voluntary accreditation through the Community Health Accreditation Program (CHAP) to ensure that our performance outcomes and processes meet and exceed Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) quality standards.

VNS has an experienced and trained staff of 450 committed employees capable of providing quality health and supportive care to a diverse patient census. We operate 24 hours a day / seven days a week and have multiple languages. Our patient outcomes and care delivery is assessed for adherence and compliance with adopted best patient protocols by an experienced clinical management staff. In June 2013, VNS transitioned to electronic health records (EHR) and equipped our nursing and therapy staff with portable tablets providing real-time access to clinical decision-support systems and connectivity to clinical supervision and other members of the patient's health team while they are with the patient in the patient's home.

Based on internal and external assessments of patient outcomes, we believe we are meeting agency objectives in delivering quality comprehensive care to the residents of the 54 communities we serve.
Along with other healthcare providers in the network, we are reviewing all of our processes to ensure we are doing all that is possible to meet the triple aim of healthcare reform: improved outcomes, increased patient satisfaction and cost-reduction in the delivery of care.
While there are a variety of indicators of patient outcomes, we continue to work with hospitals and emerging managed care organizations to reduce the incidence of hospitalization among our patient census. VNS is implementing an Integrated Chronic Care Management (ICCM) protocol for chronically ill patients which to date is showing reductions in the incidence of rehospitalization for at risk patients. We also anticipate that our new point of care integrated technology and software capabilities will improve patient adherence to their recovery plan and result in improved patient outcomes. We are also planning to expand our use of telemonitoring services for chronically ill patients. Telemonitoring provides early detection of conditions requiring intervention and supports the patient's ability to maintain independence at home.
We can also report that VNS is providing access to quality home healthcare services for underinsured and uninsured residents in our service area. In the year ending June 2017, VNS provided $3.4 million in unreimbursed care for 1,902 patients; this included uninsured patients in need of care, patients requiring services for which VNS was not reimbursed; and the difference between reimbursement levels and the reasonable cost of providing clinically needed patient care.