Since Allina Health formed Inbound Health in 2020, the hospital-at-home and SNF-at-home enablement platform has helped the Minneapolis-based health system deliver more than 5,000 home-based acute care episodes.
Prior to Inbound Health, this level of care didn’t exist at Allina Health.
“They had a home health division with traditional 60-day visits,” Inbound Health CEO Dave Kerwar told Home Health Care News. “They were never actually taking patients and replacing either a hospital stay or a skilled nursing facility stay. The platform we created is everything from the care model to embedded clinical workflows across 350 different disease states. The operating model is essentially the playbook for how an entire episode of care should operate.”
As a company, Inbound Health was originally under the Allina Health umbrella. Last year, the company spun-off and became a separate entity. Inbound Health launched with $20 million in funding from Flare Capital Partners.
“We started this internally within Allina Health,” Kerwar said. “As we built out our platform, it became probably one of the largest programs in the country. We designed it in such a way that it could be essentially multi-tenant. We could do this not just for Allina, but other health systems too.”
At its core, Inbound Health is an enablement platform. The company works with health systems and health plans that are in various stages of development with their hospital-at-home or SNF-at-home programs.
“They may have some or none of the ingredients we have on our side — the full stack of capabilities that a health system or health plan needs to launch those programs,” Kerwar said.
This means the care model, clinical leaders, a technology platform that includes a workflow layer, a virtual command center made up of biometric monitoring nurses, triage nurses and virtual hospitalists.
Inbound Health’s also has supply chain, labor and logistics partners, a machine learning analytics platform, an operations unit and a payer-contracting capability for health systems.
“We bring all those capabilities, but most of the health systems and health plans we talk to have some, if not all of those ingredients,” Kerwar said. “Our operating model allows us, over time, to turn on or off those capability sets, so our health systems can look at us as a flexible partner.”
As for its work with Allina Health, Inbound Health has been able to achieve similar – or improved – clinical outcomes when compared to traditional facility-based care, according to Kerwar.
Inbound Health has also been able to help Allina Health lower total cost of care by 30-40% on a risk-adjusted basis.
In addition to working with Allina Health, Inbound Health has recently formed partnerships with health plans, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota.
Looking ahead, Inbound Health plans on going after more health plan partners in other markets.Ultimately, it is looking to take on more risk.
“Inbound Health will help its health system partners assume risk over a population, or over a larger time frame of episode of care, so we won’t just be paid fee for service for these types of episodes, but will be compensated based on our performance to achieve cost savings,” Kerwar said.
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