News and Market Developments
McKnights Home Care: Home Care Partnerships from Two Long-Term Care Organizations (4/19) - United Church Homes and Ohio's Hospice have partnered on home care. With its new hospice ally, United Church Homes believes its campuses can be a hub for external growth.
Beckers Hospital Review: AT&T Launches AI-Powered Home Monitoring Tech (4/18) - AT&T announced a partnership with Cherish, to launch Cherish Serenity, an artificial intelligence-powered home monitoring device. The use of AI as a monitoring tool is designed to make it less invasive than a camera or wearable-based monitoring tool.
Forbes: Examining The Realities Of Hospital-At-Home Technology Implementation (4/17) - Hospital-at-home has the potential to transform the full care experience for both providers and patients. Instead of requiring a patient to be onsite at a facility, acute hospital care can be provided at home. This article examines the opportunities as well as the concerns in making the hospital-at-home concept a reality.
Home Health Care News: In Its Collaboration With Chamberlain University, BrightStar Care Is Creating Its Own Talent Pipeline (4/17) - BrightStar Care is partnering with Chamberlain University to launch a home health care didactic course under Chamberlain University’s Practice-Ready, Specialty-Focused model. By teaming up, BrightStar Care and Chamberlain University are aiming to address the nursing shortage.
Stat News: Demand for Home Health Aids is Soaring. So Why Are They Still So Undervalued? (4/14) - The number of home health aide jobs is expected to increase 25% between 2021 and 2031 — much faster than average, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it’s a job that can take a toll on workers. Roughly 21 percent of home health care workers report poor mental health, according to a survey of close to 3,000 workers published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2021. Improving the working conditions of home health aides is paramount in a system that’s decided that “allowing for care to be done in the comfort of someone’s home is the more effective, better way to go."
Business Wire: Enhabit Home Health & Hospice Awarded First Age-Friendly Care at Home Certification from CHAP (4/13) - Enhabit, a home health and hospice provider, announced it has been awarded the Age-Friendly Care at Home Certification from Community Health Accreditation Partner (CHAP). The CHAP certification program brings Age-Friendly Health Systems to home health and hospice settings. The movement has been shown to reduce cost of care, improve clinical retention and satisfaction, and improve patient outcomes.
Modern Healthcare: Salesforce Sets Sights on Home Health (4/13) - Salesforce is adding a home health component to its Health Cloud software solution this summer that will automate the intake and scheduling processes for patients with in-home treatments. The plan is to target home health care providers and payers in the United States. Home Health capabilities include allowing non-clinical employees to access certain data from the EHR to aid scheduling.
Business Wire: Outset Medical to Present Research Highlighting Home Hemodialysis Success for Underserved Populations at National Kidney Foundation Spring Clinical Meetings (4/12) - Outset Medical, a medical technology company, will be presenting five new abstracts providing promising insights on the clinical and financial benefits of home hemodialysis (HHD), gender biases toward female nephrologists, and other pertinent topics related to kidney disease. The latest studies demonstrate how Outset is working to bring innovation to the dialysis industry by overcoming the bias that chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients need perfect conditions to treat at home.
Home Health Care News: Five Home Health Leaders Weigh In On The Growth Mistakes They See Providers Making (4/12) - To get a better understanding of what home health operators need to know when it comes to the right and wrong way to grow, Home Health Care News asked several home health leaders to weigh in. According to them, the lack of proper training, failure to embrace payer diversification and not taking patient experience into account are all examples of errors that can be detrimental to a company’s growth plans.
PR Newswire: Akron Children's Secures NIH Grant to Lead Research on Home-Based Pediatric Palliative Care (4/11) - Akron Children's Hospital has been awarded a three-year $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) to better define the practices of high-quality pediatric palliative care, particularly in seeking out the voices of the children, teens and young adults at the center of that care. The study will engage children, teens and young adults and their parents and providers receiving pediatric palliative care services at Akron Children's, Nationwide Children's Hospital, Cincinnati Children's Hospital, Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, and Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego.
Home Health Care News: Humana, Elara Caring, Frontpoint Health Share Best Practices For MA-Home Health Relationships (4/11) - The nature of home health provider-Medicare Advantage (MA) plan relationships has slowly begun to change, as some organizations have found ways to successfully work together and derive value from these collaborations more effectively. The underlying model that exists between MA and providers is that the latter delivers care on a per-visit fee basis, and then subsidizes their losses through the company’s Medicare fee-for-service business. One solution is to rethink the care delivery model. The delivery of in-home visits exclusively, on a per-unit basis, isn’t as effective as the ability to combine that with remote care, be that RPM or virtual visits.
Business Wire: InterSystems Helps Pria Improve Patient Outcomes and Streamline At-Home Care Delivery with Health Connect Cloud (4/11) - Pria, a health care technology company focused on chronic care management, announced that Pria will be using InterSystems Health Connect Cloud to deliver the integration required to accelerate Pria’s efforts to revolutionize the operating system for health at home. With Pria, providers, patients, and family caregivers can access a suite of health management tools to help them monitor and manage all aspects of their prescribed care plans.
Home Health Care News: How a Home Health Provider Slashed Its Readmission Rate by Nearly Half (4/10) - Sparta Community Hospital, a 25-bed full-service acute care medical facility, has made successful care transitions a priority in an effort to lower rehospitalizations and ER visits. At-Home Health Care is a Medicare certified home health agency that serves five counties surrounding Sparta. Within the organization, At-Home Health Care has developed a discharge care coordination team to further improve care transitions.
Home Health Care News: Why The Growing Home Care Company AccordCare is Payer Agnostic (4/10) - Most home care companies are generally committed to a single payer source more than they are the other ones, whether it’s private pay or Medicaid. But many companies have begun engaging with Medicare Advantage (MA), too, and most all companies have at least thought about diversifying their revenue, at least by a little. Still, there’s generally a company thesis that starts with one payer source. For the AccordCare, that’s not necessarily the case. AccordCare provides both home health care and personal care, though mostly the latter, to Medicaid, private payers, and Medicare.
Dark Daily: Best Buy Health and Atrium Health Collaborate on a Hospital-at-Home Program, Leveraging the Electronics Retailer’s ‘Specially Trained’ Geek Squad (4/10) - Hospital-at-home programs like that of Atrium Health are a trend that may create new opportunities for local clinical laboratories to support physicians treating patients in the comfort of their own homes. Best Buy Health announced a partnership with Atrium Health in a Hospital at Home program that the healthcare system plans to scale nationally. This latest partnership between a retail giant and healthcare network demonstrates how innovation is working its way into the US healthcare system via companies not traditionally involved in direct patient care. These two organizations see an opportunity to combine their strengths to “enhance the patient experience of receiving hospital-level care at home."
Skilled Nursing News: Shortage of Skilled Nursing Beds, Best Buy Effect, Managed Care Growth Accelerate SNF-at-Home (4/9) - Inbound Health offers hospital-at-home and SNF-at-home programs, and has enabled Twin Cities health system Allina Health to conduct more than 5,000 home-based acute care episodes. The average length-of-stay on the hospital side is eight days for patients waiting for a SNF bed, whereas those with SNF-at-home go home in three days. Like many markets across the country, Minnesota is confronting a reduction in skilled nursing beds, which is forcing patients to remain in hospitals for longer periods of time.
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