While traditional home-based care operators specialize in caring for people in their homes, other health care providers have begun leveraging the setting, too.
One company, Aware Recovery Care, is offering addiction treatment services in the home. This is highly unique for substance use disorder treatment.
“This is a company delivering an innovative longitudinal in-home care model that treats a disease as a chronic disease, and approaches that from the standpoint of providing whole-person care over an extended period of time,” Aware Recovery Care CEO Brian Holzer told Home Health Care News’ sister publication Behavioral Health Business on a recent podcast. “It just so happens, with regards to Aware, that the at-risk population we’re treating are those suffering from addiction.”
Founded in 2011, Aware Recovery Care is value-based in-home addiction treatment company that offers services across nearly a dozen states.
Currently, the company has 16 value-based agreements with insurance providers. This has allowed the company to grow, according to Holzer.
“We receive a monthly bundle rate for our services, and we’re delivering a clinically transformative care model, working within the confines of what has been a fairly traditional facility-based and sort of outpatient level of care in addiction,” he said.
Before taking the helm of Aware Recovery Care, Brian Holzer was the president of Kindred Healthcare and the CEO of Lacuna Health. His previous roles gave him a unique vantage point.
What’s more, he sees parallels between post-acute care and behavioral health care.
“It’s sort of eerily similar,” Holzer said. “If I were a betting man, I would say that mental health and substance use disorders are going to undergo the same type of transformation that we’ve seen with some of the traditional post-acute care assets, like home health care.”
Specifically, when Holzer began working in the post-acute care space roughly 10 years ago, home health care wasn’t recognized as an important strategic service for health systems.
“If you fast-forward 10 years, we’re seeing a lot of vertical integration where hospitals are forming joint ventures with home health companies, outright acquiring or starting their own home health companies,” he said. “Then, you’re obviously seeing a run of insurance companies flat out acquiring home health companies to control for the quality and cost of that care delivered, as it is being recognized as an important extension of facility-based care.”
Another similarity Holzer noted was that both post-acute care and behavioral health are ailed by the fact that patients being discharged from the hospital are typically receiving care from multiple companies that are disconnected from each other.
“Someone going through, at their pace, a journey towards recovery is left to navigate the various levels of service that they may need, without really any of the integrated care management, or transitions of care support to ensure that they’re at the right level of care at the right time,” Holzer said.
Aware Recovery Care is meant to be a response to this challenge.
“[Aware] was essentially constructed, by our founders, to stitch together those levels of care,” Holzer said.
Looking ahead, it’s likely that substance use disorder treatment will become increasingly important to senior care.
Though substance abuse is often overlooked in seniors, there were over 30,000 unintentional drug overdoses among individuals ages 65 and older from 1999 to 2020, according to CDC data.
With this in mind, Aware Recovery Care is well-positioned to see success in the space, as seniors have long been vocal about their preference for at-home care.
“We think there is a growing acceptance that care can be appropriately delivered in the home, and that is not something that has been available to folks going through recovery services for their addiction,” Holzer said.
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