This article is a part of your HHCN+ Membership
As part of its 2026 home health strategy, home health and hospice provider CommonSpirit Health at Home is moving care upstream and plotting a thoughtful AI strategy – while “salivating” over the influx of solutions.
Additionally, the provider is adjusting its home infusion strategy to focus on specialty and chronic therapies, a move that Trisha Crissman, president and CEO, told Home Health Care News will be “transformational.”
Milford, Ohio-based CommonSpirit Health at Home operates 94 home health, hospice, palliative care, and home infusion locations across the U.S. The provider is the home-based care arm of the nonprofit health system CommonSpirit Health.
HHCN sat down with Crissman to discuss her care continuum-based growth strategy, the interlock between the provider’s home health and hospice service lines and why CommonSpirit Health at Home is avoiding “boiling the ocean” with AI.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
HHCN: What are your priorities for home-based care in 2026, both in terms of growth and services?
Crissman: CommonSpirit Health at Home has skilled home health, hospice, palliative care, home infusion, so ensuring that we have a continuum of care in as many markets as possible, expanding service line opportunities.
A piece that affects our hospice effectiveness and our strategy is fueled by the fact that we’re tied to a large health system, and that the majority of our patients, hospice in particular, come to us as a result of an acute discharge. As you can imagine, that’s been a result of the last exacerbation, and then, finally, someone’s having a conversation that you’re hospice eligible. We admit them, and they’re dying very, very quickly, unfortunately. So our strategy is that we’re still going to serve those patients, and those patients are going to come to us out of the acute setting.
But we’re changing our strategy to move upstream into physician enterprise, physician specialty clinics, ambulatory centers and clinics, and then utilizing eligibility triggers within the EHR to help identify eligibility before the next exacerbation. I believe this will drastically improve an earlier access to care for hospice patients and home health patients, as well as then, of course, better outcomes and a better patient experience and helping physicians and practitioners with the heavy lift of that eligibility, using data and analytics to help us do that.
Then have the team from Health at Home, who are the experts, help explain the benefits and the value proposition, engaging those patients and caregivers earlier. I’m super excited about that, and I think it will completely transform patients’ experience at Health at Home, because they can access the care earlier. Ultimately, if we’re doing that, it would prevent the next exacerbation and create earlier this almost womb-like envelope around patients and caregivers as they navigate health care, which is really, really difficult for any of us to do.
Having an earlier contact to help them navigate what the next right level of care or need might be. If it’s home health, maybe it’s hospice or palliative care, but that’s a huge strategy for us.
Is that a relatively new effort or initiative, or do you have any results to date that you could discuss?
Of course, home health and hospice providers are always marketing to the community and targeting physicians and providers and [assisted living and skilled nursing facilities]. That’s not new, but this is a different approach … that’s really utilizing the combination of eligibility triggers within the EHR and using that information tied with a navigator that’s in the clinics to help identify eligibility earlier. So that’s new.
The way we’re approaching the clinics is different, and with what data and information is different. This is just brand spanking new, in alignment with physician enterprises with CommonSpirit Health that we’re very excited about.
What do you see as the major forces shaping the market right now?
AI, AI and AI — I mean technology solutions. We’re all salivating about what it can do to help us be more efficient and effective and improve our engagement of our limited resources with clinicians, etc.
The problem is that we want all of it at one time, like now. But the best thing we could do as providers is to be thoughtful in the application of technology solutions for what makes the biggest impact, what we can do today and incrementally, versus trying to boil the ocean and doing all of it at once.
But I think predictive analytics, data, data, data and AI – and how we will use that to our advantage, and finding ways so that it can improve the patient’s experience, maybe in caregivers’ experience as well. I don’t think we’ve thought that through enough, so I’m excited about what might lie ahead with that.
What else can we expect to see from Common Spirit in 2026?
Health at Home [has] just solidified our strategy plan for the next five years, and as I mentioned, it includes significant growth and expansion in markets where we already are, as well as new markets for home health and hospice and the engagement of physician enterprise.
But another really cool component is we’re shifting our home infusion strategy to be more focused on specialty and chronic therapies, which is going to be transformational for home infusion. So that’s an emerging strategy for us right now, likely 12 to 18 to 24, months in the making.
Being a part of one of the largest health systems in the country lends itself to being in the forefront of innovation and how our health system utilizes technology and leverages opportunity, affords us a lot of opportunity as well. In 2026 and beyond, because we’re a part of such a robust health care system across the country, I think the sky’s the limit, so to speak, is what I’m trying to say. Opportunity abounds.
Companies featured in this article:
