Inbound Health — an enablement platform that helps health systems and health plans develop hospital-at-home and SNF-at-home programs — is expanding to include post-surgical care for general surgery.
The company’s home hospital care program will now include orthopedics, bariatrics and hernia as part of this expansion. One of the main goals is to help solve a major pain point for hospitals, Inbound Health CEO Dave Kerwar told Home Health Care News.
“ORs across the country are essentially getting backed up, and their ability to increase the elective surgery count is getting constrained,” he said. “This is because there’s no brick-and-mortar skilled nursing facility bed for the patient to step down to.”
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.
Before he took the helm of Inbound, Kerwar was the chief product officer at Mount Sinai Health System. Kerwar’s time at the health system taught him that general, or elective surgeries, are the financial lifeblood of these types of organizations.
“That’s where a lot of profit is gained,” he said. “It’s what really allows a health system to be financially sustainable. When you can’t increase your elective surgery rate, it constrains your ability to run a financially sustainable health system. Our program now uniquely solves that problem.”
Inbound began developing this expansion effort roughly 18 months ago, inspired by the boost of patient volume after COVID-19 surgery restrictions were lifted.
Through its expanded offerings, Inbound takes on patients who have received general surgery.
Sometimes, this means meeting patients at the end of their surgery in an ambulatory surgery center, allowing them to recover in their home. Other times, this means that Inbound is meeting patients at the end of the surgery in an acute care setting, shortening their length of stay in the hospital by allowing them to recover at home.
“That does two things,” Kerwar said. “One is it frees up beds in the hospital for higher-acuity cases, and it lowers the length of stay for patients that are otherwise in the hospital waiting for a skilled nursing facility bed to free up. As we talk to health systems around the country, having a comprehensive solution that allows for surgeries to shift from inpatient to outpatient, and allows patients to leave the hospital sooner, is a really attractive capability from both a clinical quality perspective and a financial perspective.”
In order to help health systems and hospitals relieve this pain point, Inbound brings a full stack of capabilities.
“We bring the care model, which now includes these surgical care models,” Kerwar said. “We bring the clinical leadership, we bring a technology and analytics platform, and we bring all the supply chain and the labor that is required — not just virtual labor, but in-home labor. We also bring the payment model. We negotiate with the private payers, commercial and Medicare Advantage payers, on behalf of the health system, to help them get a sustainable reimbursement for this model.”
Additionally, Inbound supplies a virtual command center that includes biometric monitoring nurses that are watching over patients and 24/7 triage nurses who are looking to identify the next best action of care. The company also brings local market staff.
Prior to working with a health system, Inbound scopes out a 12-month path to financial ROI for the organization.
“We put our fees at risk against that,” Kerwar said. “Our model is pretty simple; we charge a per episode rate. We put a good portion of that per episode rate at risk. We only receive the contingent part of that payment if we can help them achieve their strategic objectives that we set out before the contract is signed.”
Looking ahead, Kerwar believes that the program will only continue to accelerate.
“This is the future of how care will be delivered,” he said. “We’re excited to be running one of the largest programs in the country. We’re also excited that we’ll be scaling to at least two additional markets, and potentially two to three additional health systems, this year.”
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