In order to stay ahead of the needs of consumers and payers, post-acute care leaders — including those in home-based care — are looking to innovate how care and services are delivered to seniors.
A major part of this is moving their organizations toward more integrated, cross-continuum care.
At Homebase Medical, this means placing a greater emphasis on improving communication.
“When you think about the continuum, where things are difficult is communication; it’s the handoffs,” Dwight Brown, CEO of Homebase Medical, said last week during a panel discussion at Aging Media Network’s CONTINUUM event. “2023 will be a year of more excellence in communication, figuring out exactly what our customers want. How do they want to be communicated with? How do we always up the bar?”
Homebase Medical is a medical practice that provides palliative care, chronic disease management, transition management and in-depth personal health assessments to people in their homes. The organization is a part of the SCAN Group.
On its end, Lifespark is focused on scaling its value-based care program — the Lifespark Complete Program.
“We’re really doing it in partnership with payers, providers, and independent and assisted living buildings in a way of just creating complete senior health. And doing it through a density model, where we build the relationships, the handoffs, the transitions and a shared value arrangement with all partners to make sure that everyone has upside to the value-based wins,” Matt Nyquist, chief population health officer at Lifespark, said during the discussion.
Lifespark is a Minneapolis-based senior care provider with both home health and senior living operations. The company’s other services lines include home care, hospice and primary care. Nyquist was formerly an executive at UnitedHealth Group’s (NYSE: UNH) Optum.
As part of the larger shift of moving care to the home setting, telehealth has emerged as a prominent care delivery tool, especially amid the pandemic.
However, Brown cautions against an over reliance on telehealth and virtual care.
“I’m going to be controversial — I think of telehealth as the microwave cooking of health care,” he said. “Nobody here asked for microwave Thanksgiving dinner. It was the option that you do when nothing else works, right? We do telehealth, our acceptance rates or engagement rates for telehealth are terrible. It’s about half or a third of a visit when we reach out to somebody to try to set up a telehealth [visit], and the actual no-show rates are about double.”
For Lifespark, its focus on home-based care is part of a larger strategy to meet consumers where they are.
Currently, Lifespark’s business is 60% in the home and roughly 40% in a facility.
“We’re trying to stay out of the consumer decision around where they want to receive health care and how they want to receive health care, and make sure we provide services in the best way possible, regardless of where they live,” Nyquist said.
Michael Bailey, CEO of American Health Partners, believes that the current reimbursement market isn’t designed to incentivize home-based care on a continual basis.
With this in mind, he stressed the importance of working with payer partners.
“We need some reimbursement change and some fresh thinking around that,” Bailey said.
American Health Partners is a Franklin, Tennessee-based post-acute care organization that offers home health and hospice services. The company also operates 29 skilled nursing, rehabilitation and acute care psychiatric centers for older adults.
As leaders, Bailey, Brown and Nyquist also have their eye on the larger trend of payers — large insurers — acquiring providers.
Nyquist, in particular, sees both the upside and downside to this trend.
“If they buy someone, now they’re aligned,” he said. “It’s going to drive referrals, but it’s also very difficult to acquire companies well, and hold their culture and value.”
Bailey pointed out this trend is likely here to stay for a while.
“I think they’re going to continue to do that,” he said. “I don’t know that it’s a bad thing. Big insurance, … they’re so high level [that] it’s very difficult for them to get down to the bedside. They’ve got to either partner with us – a provider – to do that, or they’ve got to buy that. The path of least resistance, frankly, is for them to acquire it, and then turn it over and let somebody run it.”
Ultimately, the focus should be on what’s best for patients, according to Brown.
“If it’s a good thing for the patients, then that’s good for all of us,” he said. “And we then need to figure out how to partner with these large organizations that are doing these acquisitions.”
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