Home-based care is going to be a larger part of health care’s future. As a result, it’s beginning to attract considerable attention from entrepreneurs and other innovators.
But as new trends arise with the shift toward the home, including new technology, partnership opportunities and payment models, it’ll be up to each provider to decide whether or not it’s worth it to explore them.
“There are a lot of emerging trends right now,” Joseph Brence, the head of home and community care strategy and solutions at MedBridge, said recently at the National Association for Home Care & Hospice (NAHC) Financial Management Conference. “How do you consider how to implement those things, and whether it makes sense?”
The Seattle-based MedBridge develops evidence-based solutions for health care organizations and professionals that are using — or trying to use — innovative technology, among other things. Brence is also an adjunct professor of health administration at New York University.
Generally, there are many stages to innovation adoption: There are the first group of adopters, then early adopters, the early majority, the late majority and laggards.
It’s likely that home health providers will fall into the same categories. For instance, there are the innovators, such as MaineHealth Care at Home, which has been doing telehealth visits since the turn of the century.
There are others who heavily invested resources into telehealth early on. Then, of course, there are a slew of providers who adopted the technology once they were forced to during the pandemic.
In 2020, 23.6% of all provider visits were of the telehealth variety, compared to just 0.3% in 2019, according to Brence. The COVID-19 crisis and other external factors forced innovation upon the home health industry quicker than they would have otherwise.
“There are predictable groups of individuals that are going to be willing to adopt some of the technology and some of the innovative models, but there’s also subsets of these individuals that simply will never adopt them,” Brence said. “You’re going to have nurses, [for instance], that are very resistant to providing acute-level care in the home.”
Telehealth has been an issue of intrigue for home health stakeholders, given that it is not reimbursable through Medicare as of now.
“So many out there may be saying, well, we don’t get paid for this,” Brence said. “But I’m going to challenge you on that, if your home health agency hasn’t started doing this yet.”
The Lafayette, Louisiana-based LHC Group Inc. (Nasdaq: LHCG) conducted over 260,000 virtual visits in 2020, according to Brence, proving that one of the leaders in the home health industry was willing to invest considerable resources in telehealth despite the compensation challenges.
Payers take notice
Part of the reason that Brence and others believe in investing in future technologies and methods is because of health plans. While it may not be paying off in a monetary sense now, there’s a strong chance it could down the line.
In 2020, 97% of surveyed health plan executives said they believed that more care needs to shift into the home, according to a CareCentrix report.
“We’re delivering care differently — it’s more efficient, more accessible and cheaper,” Brence said. “Payers are taking note of that, and we need to consider that.”
Medicare Advantage (MA) plans, in particular, have become a new way for home-based care agencies to care for patients that aren’t on traditional Medicare over the last few years.
“So if 97% of health plan executives have indicated that they believe more care is going to be shifted to the home, … I think that the payers will be driving a lot of this,” Brence said. “And the question is whether your agency is ready.”
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