CVS Health (NYSE: CVS) pointed out Wednesday that only 1% of care in the U.S. is delivered in the home. It also pointed out that it would like to play a part in changing that.
Before brick-and-mortar hospitals and facilities became the center of the U.S. health care system, as much as 40% of care was delivered in the home. CVS wrote about that trend, among others, in a post dubbed “Helping older adults receive at-home and local care.”
“Most older adults would like to reverse that trend,” CVS Health EVP and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Sree Chaguturu said. “Four out of five older adults would prefer to get health services at home because it’s convenient and comfortable.”
Chaguturu noted that the most exciting part of the care-to-home trend is the range of services that can now be provided safely in the home, including hospital-level care and hospice care.
“How do we make sure that we have services in a home that help enable your health care experience?” he said.
CVS Health has transformed its business model over the last couple of years to focus more on health care delivery.
Throughout that transformation, it has emphasized the importance of bringing more care to the home to drive value. The company put its money where its mouth was when it acquired the at-home care enabler Signify Health for $8 billion earlier this year.
During CVS Health’s second-quarter earnings call last week, company leaders further explained the strategic importance of at-home care and Signify Health.
“Signify Health is core to our home health services strategy,” CVS Health CEO Karen Lynch said on the call. “Signify enables better health in the home, and has an unmatched ability to build trust and connect with 3 million patients in their homes annually. We capture valuable insights into a patient’s broader care needs during in-home evaluations, and are able to create engagement points across other health services for our health plan partners.”
Chaguturu dove deeper into the power of the in-home health evaluation.
“Part of that in-home health evaluation is to ask the patient to bring out all of their medications,” Chaguturu said. “What you see is that patients will get medication prescribed from all sorts of sources of care — from an urgent care, from their primary care team, after discharge from a hospitalization. And it can become incredibly confusing for a patient to understand exactly, ‘What medications should I be taking,’ and, ‘What are they doing for me?’ It’s really fundamentally basic but so important in making sure that a patient gets the care that they need.”
In the past, CVS Health has hinted that they may be open to even more home-based care acquisitions moving forward.
From company leaders’ perspective, more capabilities in the home equal more opportunities to deliver value-based care.
“I think, over time, we’ll look at what other assets [we need],” Lynch said in May. “As you think longer-term around the corner, there might be additional opportunities in the home.
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