News and Market Developments
Home Health Care News: (2/1/21) – DispatchHealth has announced a partnership with Humana, Inc to offer advanced hospital-level care in the home. Humana’s home-based care business lines include Humana At Home and Kindred at Home. The company’s Medicare Advantage (MA) memberships include 4.5 million beneficiaries. Colorado-based DispatchHealth offers mobile high-acuity services through its emergency medicine-trained teams. The company currently operates in 18 states. The pair will work together to initially offer hospital-level care services in Denver and Tacoma, Washington. Later this year, the initiative will expand to serve patients in Texas, Arizona and Nevada.
UVA Today: (1/27/21) – A three-year, $4.4 million Federal Communications Commission (FCC) grant will enable UVA Health to expand its Interactive Home Monitoring care for patients with serious and chronic conditions, including COVID-19 and diabetes.
Landmark Health: (1/14/21) – Southwestern Health Resources (SWHR) and Landmark Health announced their strategic partnership to provide longitudinal care to seniors with complex medical needs by bringing interdisciplinary medical care into patients’ homes. Landmark’s mobile, physician-led teams will work collaboratively with SWHR network physicians to amplify access to care and ensure better outcomes and experience for thousands of complex patients in Medicare Advantage plans.
Healthcare Innovation: (1/8/21) – COVID-19 has impacted healthcare delivery for the future. Medical providers had to cost cut to manage and survive the loss of patient volume, companies had to pivot to a remote working environment and my face the reality of outsourcing back-office functions, independent practices failed to have financial reserves to deal with the shortfall, and medical groups and plans evaluated their commitment to health equity.
Landmark Health: (1/5/21) – Brown & Toland Physicians and Landmark Health announced a collaboration to extend comprehensive medical care into the homes of patients who are homebound or have high care needs. The new arrangement will allow Landmark to bring medical, behavioral, and palliative care, along with social services, to individuals where they reside.
The Guardian: (1/2/21) – In the wake of COVID, doctors and designers are radically adapting their thinking about what a hospital can be and what it should deliver. James Kinross, a surgeon who works at St Mary’s and sits on its redevelopment planning committee envisages primary-care physicians or GPs taking on more responsibility (aided by decision-support technology), secondary care or specialist doctors spending more time in the community and an expansion of social care. Hospitals as physical entities will become specialist hubs, he says, with each specialism concentrated at one or a few hubs within a region, rather than replicated across many generalist hospitals.
Healthcare IT News: (1/1/21) – The University of Michigan Hospital implemented a patient monitoring at home, or PM@H program, using fully managed device kits prior to the pandemic. The telehealth program has helped the provider organization preserve hospital capacity through multiple COVID-19 surges, while decreasing readmission rates and ED utilization.
Intermountain Healthcare: (12/30/20) – Heber Valley Hospital has begun offering Intermountain TeleHealth oncology services to local patients, including onsite chemotherapy treatments and consultations with Intermountain Healthcare’s team of oncologists and cancer experts from Intermountain Cancer Center. Intermountain oncologists and specialists will collaborate with local caregivers to provide individualized support and medically-advanced care via video technology, reducing the need for patients to travel long distances to receive cancer care.
HIT Consultant: (12/11/20) – DispatchHealth launched a Clinic Without Walls, a new service line offering patients a telemedicine visit with in-person assistance for more complex medical visits.
Landmark Health: (11/12/20) – Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and Landmark Health announced they are extending their in-home medical care collaboration into New Hampshire’s Rockingham, Merrimack, and Hillsborough counties. The expansion into New Hampshire marked the 15th state Landmark offers services.
Fast Company: (9/8/20) – Hospital buildings add a huge amount to medical bills. Moving care to people’s homes could dramatically reduce those costs, Dr. Bruce Leff, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a longtime proponent of remote care technologies argues. An estimated $3.8 trillion is spent annually on healthcare in the U.S., and more than $1 trillion of that goes to cover hospital care. Seeing room to bring that cost down and reap the profits, several hospital-at-home startups are now bringing this model to markets and patients across the country. They could revolutionize how hospitals provide care, and where.
The Commonwealth Fund: (7/7/20) – Multiple studies have shown home hospitalizations can be safer, cheaper, and more effective than institutional care. Concerns about possible surges of COVID-19 patients, combined with the spread of value-based payment and companies offering technology and operational support, have prompted some health systems and health plans to take a second look at the hospital-at-home model. In this issue, the Commonwealth Fund reports on health systems that have adapted and adopted the hospital-at-home approach to help them respond to the pandemic while still ensuring access for all patients.
Morning Consult Op-ed: (6/3/20) – Former Senators and Senate Majority Leaders Tom Daschle and Bill Frist issued an op-ed noting the importance of home-based care and technologies to enable home-based care. The former Sens. call for policymakers to think, “beyond essential medical services and consider the non-medical drivers of health that are often as essential to good health outcomes.” The Senators conclude several key takeaways including:
- Home based care is cost-effective for patients and providers.
- Home care helps to address social isolation, the onset of potential severe illness, and hospital readmission.
- Nursing and medical staff allows for in the home supplemental benefits.
- Private sector companies have been innovative in creating technology that make in patient care technologies enabled in home environments like patient monitoring devices, infusion therapy, and dialysis machines.
Health Leaders: (6/26/20) – Hospital at home initiatives are gaining traction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mayo Clinic announced advanced care at home, "a new care model that will deliver innovative, comprehensive, and complex care to patients" at home. Earlier this month, Intermountain Healthcare launched a similar initiative. Both health systems are partnering with outside entities to provide these services.
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