News and Market Developments
Pharmacy Practice News: Advantages of Hospital-at-Home Care (6/17) - When many other health services nearly ground to a halt, the hospital-at-home model received a profound boost during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and experts are asking whether this could serve as a model for the future of healthcare. There are many benefits, according to Payal Sharma, DNP, MSN, RN, a nurse practitioner in the gastrointestinal and metabolic surgery department at New-York Presbyterian Hospital/Will Cornell Medicine, in New York City. Ms. Sharma and colleagues wrote that the model meets the needs of inpatient acute care with an “intensive at-home hospital admission enabled by technology, multidisciplinary teams and ancillary services” (J Sci Comm 2022;29[3]).
Home Health Care News: Care Coordination Platform Sees 17% Spike in Home Health Referrals (6/16) – For home-based providers, maximizing the seamlessness of a post-hospital care transition is paramount. As hospitals are sending more patients than ever to the home, the ones that can take the patient with the most ease are more likely to win out. The takeaway for home health providers is that efficient care transitions can result in more referrals for their business. And ideally, if both sides – the hospital and the home health provider – are investing in tools for interoperability and technology, those transitions will get better over time. Even when more patients than ever are headed home.
Cision PR Newswire: Integrated Home Care Services, Inc. Announces Expansion Plans (6/16) – Integrated Home Care Services, Inc. (IHCS), the nation's leading independent administrator of Home Health, Durable Medical Equipment and Home Infusion benefits, has announced plans for continued national expansion. The announcement comes as studies demonstrate a growing reliance on home-based healthcare services and a dramatic increase in the prevalence of homebound older adults who require access to care.
Home Health Care News: Armed with Home-Based Care Capabilities, Advocate Aurora Health Is Ready for Next Step (6/15) - Advocate Aurora Health may have surprised some with its acquisition of the home care franchise company Senior Helpers last year. But that’s just one of the steps the health system is taking to build out its home-based care capabilities, as well as a larger, full continuum overall. In the late 2000s, Advocate Aurora made a deliberate decision to prioritize and shape its value-based care models. Building its post-acute strategy came soon after, which included its home care and home health lines, plus a skilled nursing facility network and advanced care programs.
Home Health Care News: Home Health Providers Must Leverage Data in Value-Based Care Relationships
(6/15) - Almost all home-based care providers are trying to move toward value- and risk-based care, either because they want to or have to. The mission for Schiller’s organization — formerly the Alliance for Home Health Quality and Innovation (AHHQI) — is to increase its output to give home-based care an authoritative, free-standing source of research and information. As part of that mission, Jennifer Schiller, the executive director of the Research Institute for Home Care, is passionate about the need for more information in the home-based care space through research and partnerships.
Seniors Matter: Home care
company is bringing the ER to the living room (6/13) - A
Colorado startup – inspired in part by the philosophy of aging in place – is
looking to provide an alternative to emergency room care in more and more
cities across the United States. Denver-based DispatchHealth provides
at-home care with mobile equipment and health care workers in small cities. DispatchHealth
co-founder and CEO Mark Prather, MD said the popularization of aging in place
literature in the 1990s and his personal experiences in emergency rooms and
intensive care units made him reconsider whether it was more effective to treat
a patient in the hospital or in their home.
Home Health Care News: Hospital-at-Home Advocates Believe the Model Can Stave Off Staffing Burnout (6/13) - Advocates of the hospital-at-home model are continuing to make a strong push for the extension of the Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver. The waiver, however, is set to expire with the public health emergency (PHE). That’s why the “Hospital Inpatient Services Modernization Act” was introduced in March. It would extend for the waiver by two years after the expiration of the PHE, and also require CMS to establish regulations regarding health and safety requirements for the program within a year of the bill’s enactment.
HealthAffairs Forefront: Person-Driven Outcome Measures Help Achieve Equitable Outcomes (6/13) - Clinicians in care settings that deliver long-term services, provide home-based primary care, or serve populations with complex needs are already required to set and measure progress toward goals. Transitioning current procedures to a person-driven outcome model would require fewer changes in these settings than others due to the existing necessary systems and processes. Additionally, the more than 2,700 care locations that have participated in the Age-Friendly Health Systems initiative have been trained on goal setting and the importance of basing care on what matters to patients. Patient-driven care is age-friendly care, so these systems should begin to integrate person-driven outcome measures as soon as possible.
Home Health Care News: Aetna Finds Value in Home-Based Care Providers Willing, Able to Share Data (6/13) - Aetna is one of the most influential health care companies in the country. It’s also heavily invested in home-based care. This past week, at HHCN’s VALUE event, Aetna CMO Kyu Rhee reiterated the company’s commitment to the home as a setting of care, and explained how care delivery has changed over the course of the last few years. Aetna is a part of CVS Health, which has been honed in on diversifying its health care offerings of late. That has led to a further focus on home-based models, potential partnerships with providers in the space, as well as the aforementioned, possible acquisition.
Home Health Care News: ‘It’s About Being in the Home’: Signify Moves Away from Telehealth (6/13) - As home-based care providers struggle to gather quality and reliable data across their platforms, Signify Health feels like it is positioned to keep growing because of the data-driven insights it does have. The Dallas-based Signify tech-enabled, value-based care platform that partners with both health plans and health systems to deliver a variety of care services to patients in their homes. Moving forward, Signify is also ready to re-adjust to a world without an active pandemic. That transition includes moving away from a telehealth-heavy approach to home care.
IT-ONLINE: Healthtech brings hospital care home (6/13) - Of the many lessons learnt from the Covid-19 pandemic, perhaps the most important is that the centuries-old model of in-hospital patient care doesn’t scale well, is expensive to maintain, uses scarce resources and still doesn’t necessarily give patients the required level of care. As far back as 2018, local digital healthtech start-up Quro Medical started tackling the problems associated with trying to look after thousands of patients in hospitals battling to keep up with demand. It seemed obvious that the best place to receive care, from the patients’ point of view, is their own homes, says Dr Vuyane Mhlomi, co-founder and CEO of Quro Medical. This started the company’s quest to develop the technology and resources to provide just that.
HealthLeaders: How Healthcare Uses Innovation To Help Seniors Age Independently (6/13) - The fastest-growing population in the US are seniors, and they're very much interested in staying healthy longer and staying at home. With that in mind, healthcare organizations are developing care management programs that allow seniors to age independently, and they're researching and investing in programs that improve home-based care, including telehealth and digital health. “Our goal is to continue assembling a portfolio of innovative health and wellness solutions that help people live well at every stage of life, while also diversifying our revenue. When it comes to the aging independently [landscape], we look at the types of solutions that seniors and their family caregivers are purchasing.” Said Sheetal Sobti who leads the aging independently category for Advocate Aurora Enterprises, a subsidiary of Milwaukee-based Advocate Aurora Health that advances innovative solutions to address people’s broader health needs.
Specialty Pharmacy Continuum: Oncology Infusion Moving From Hospital to Home (6/10) - Laure DuBois, PharmD, BCOP, pharmacy clinical coordinator at the University of Kansas Medical Center, in Kansas City, said their hospital leaders were convinced to start a home infusion program when they were shown that they could keep and treat patients rather than send them to nationwide home infusion companies. A crucial step is integrating a new home infusion program into the electronic health record (EHR), she said. “When we first started this, we had problems. Epic is our EHR and does not have a good platform for home infusion, so we started with a separate electronic ordering system. The doctors then couldn’t tell if the orders they had sent to home infusion were being fulfilled, so I hit the brakes and built home infusion as its own department in our EHR. The doctors are now able to use these order sets, make supportive care plans and treatment plans for home infusion, and then release the prescription to the home infusion pharmacy, after which they can see everything that happens.”
HealthLeaders: Humana Home Care Model Coming To Virigina, North Carolina (6/10) - Humana has announced plans to bring its home care model, onehome, to Virginia. Collaborating with existing home care providers in the market, onehome will oversee the coordination of in-home care services for Humana’s Medicare Advantage plan members in Virginia. Such services will include post-acute needs such as infusion care, nursing, occupational and physical therapy, and durable medical equipment (DME) services. There’s a “tremendous” need for a care model that provides quality, fully integrated care at home at a reduced cost, Andrew Agwunobi, M.D., MBA, and president of Humana’s Home Solutions business said in a statement. With onehome, there’s a singular point of accountability, considering the needs of patients, physicians, hospitals, and health plans for at-home care—which are usually delivered through a network of local providers.
Hea!thcare Innovation: Yale New Haven Health Announces Home Hospital Program (6/07) - On June 6, New-Haven Conn.-based Yale New Haven Health (YNHHS) announced via a press release the launch of its Home Hospital program. The program aims to serve Medicare patients that meet certain clinical and social stability criteria who live within 25 miles of Yale New Haven and Bridgeport hospitals. YNHHS is partnering with the Boston, Mass.-based Medically Home to provide the program. “The number of home hospital programs has grown dramatically nationwide since 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to launch its Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver program,” the release adds. “That program was designed to give hospitals greater flexibility to care for patients in their homes, freeing up hospital beds for COVID-19 patients.”
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