First Choice’s Switch To Olli Showcases Potential For Ai-driven Cost Savings In Home Health

When a home health provider is not happy with a business partner or system, making a switch is common sense. But First Choice Home Health & Hospice provides a case study in the benefits that can come from considering other options even if a current system is satisfactory – as well as the potential for solutions rooted in artificial intelligence to drive efficiency and free up dollars for key areas such as staffing.

“We had our existing coding solution, and we knew the results we were getting were good,” First Choice COO Beau Sorensen told Home Health Care News. Still, he saw the potential for cost savings and decided to explore options.

Murray, Utah-based First Choice–which has provided care for more than 20,000 patients and their families for the past 25 years–ultimately selected Olli Health for a 30-day pilot program.

Madison, Wisconsin’s Olli Health provides a tech-enabled managed service that handles home health coding and OASIS (outcome and assessment data set) review.

A coding algorithm within Olli recommends the correct order for primary and secondary diagnosis codes. Subsequently, human coders validate these recommendations. Olli then integrates this information back into the patient record within the EHR workflow. The same process applies to OASIS; Olli searches for inconsistencies, flags them and provides recommendations for the agency.

After a 30-day evaluation, Sorensen observed a nearly 75% cost savings without losing quality, leading him to embrace the service fully.

“It was so much more cost-effective than our existing solution that the ability to allocate that money elsewhere was a real benefit,” Sorensen said. “We are facing wage pressures, especially with our registered nurses, so being able to redirect some of that money to them was significant. Transitioning funds from a cost center to a revenue generation center was extremely helpful.”

Sorensen also noted that the overall coding time frame was improved, allowing them to get charts to physicians more quickly, resulting in a faster revenue cycle.

“Small to medium-sized agencies cannot negotiate high-volume discount pricing,” Olli Health CEO and CO-Founder Eric Steege told HHCN. “We consistently see 50% to 75% cost savings, providing a direct return on investment (ROI) in our use case. This value resonates well with agencies. Additionally, our turnaround time has been better than the current industry standard; our 90-day average is under 24 hours, which is game-changing for agencies.”

Looking ahead, Steege has plans to enhance Olli even further.

“We want to automatically ingest the right documents into our platform by being EHR agnostic,” Steege said. “Our autocoding and autoreview algorithms are improving quickly. Our goal for 2025 is to reach five-minute turnaround times with better than human accuracy, which would be transformative for the industry.”

Moving forward, Sorensen expressed excitement over using Olli and other types of artificial intelligence (AI) in home health care.

“I think there is a world of untapped opportunity for AI,” Sorensen said. “I like that Olli is not necessarily just focused on the clinical aspect of things and care delivery. It focuses on these non-revenue-generating areas where agencies have to become more efficient to survive. So, getting more efficient on the coding side will help us on our clinical side.”

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