One of the new services in healthcare, hospital-at-home (HaH), has caught my attention. I encountered an article providing more details about one company in this business (see: In-Home Healthcare Companies Bring High-Acuity Care, Including Clinical Laboratory Testing, to Patients at their Homes and Workplaces). Below is an excerpt from it:
Whatever name it is given, the high cost of keeping a patient overnight in a hospital is motivating a range of healthcare players to develop innovative ways to provide care to patients—even patients with acute conditions—in their home....One such company is DispatchHealth...which recently brought its “ER-at-Home” in-home healthcare model to cities in Texas, Massachusetts, and Washington State. Focused primarily on seniors with high-acuity medical conditions, Patients or caregivers contact DispatchHealth through their smartphone app, website, or phone call line and the company sends over a home care team consisting of a physician assistant or nurse practitioner, along with an [emergency] medical technician. The team has the ability to perform clinical laboratory studies, infusion, EKGs, and some higher-level procedures, such as the repair of complex lacerations....
....DispatchHealth provides both mobile and virtual healthcare, is in-network with healthcare insurance companies, and has relationships with healthcare systems...“Up to 50% of people who visit the emergency room every day could be treated in a lower cost setting,” said DispatchHealth Chief Executive Officer Mark Prather....In the Spokane market, the company’s six teams and two vehicles can see about seven patients per day for an average of 45 minutes to an hour per visit....DispatchHealth employs more than 200 people and has raised more than $33 million in growth capital financing, according to a company statement.
It's not clear whether hospital-at-home services like that offered by DispatchHealth can successfully compete against those offered by some of the more innovative health systems (see: Some Details about Hospital-at-Home (HaH) Services for Selected ER Patients). I suspect that at least some of the emerging start-ups may be more nimble and innovative than hospital programs. The company described in the excerpt above seems to be technically innovative.
From a purely financial perspective, health systems are not enthusiastic about long-term inpatient care. They tend to encourage hospital bed turnover. For this reason, they should be promoting their own HaH services. However, most seem to want to stick to the traditional hospital model. As I have pointed out in a previous note (see: Humana's Launches New Venture: Medicare-Centric Primary Care Clinics), health systems are being "bookended" by new entrants to healthcare. Primary care patients are being recruited by "big-box" stores like CVS and Walmart and the sicker, long-term care patient are now being focused on by start-ups like DispatchHealth and Humana.
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