Following up on their big-ticket strategic investment into at-home acute care company Medically Home, Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente are headlining a new advocacy movement backed by nearly a dozen other health systems from across the country.
Called the Advanced Care at Home Coalition, the partners are joining their voices to convince Capitol Hill to extend telehealth, remote and in-home care flexibilities implemented throughout the COVID-19 public health emergency.
The organizations said they will also be petitioning the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) to test and establish a new delivery model for advanced care at home.
“Offering acute-level, hospital-quality care at home allows physicians and care teams to treat a whole person to meet their individualized care goals, while also helping address some of the social determinants of health,” Stephen Parodi, M.D., executive vice president of The Permanente Federation, part of Kaiser Permanente, said in a statement. “This coalition supports a policy foundation for this more equitable future of health care."
Behind founding members Mayo, Kaiser and Medically Home, the new group is being backed by Adventist Health, ChristianaCare, Geisinger Health, Integris Health, Johns Hopkins Medicine, University of Michigan, Novant Health, ProMedica, Sharp Rees-Stealy Medical Group, UNC Health and UnityPoint Health, according to the announcement.
Participation in the Advanced Care at Home Coalition doesn’t include any formal commitments or requirements, a spokesperson told Fierce Healthcare. Rather, “the members will focus on advocacy by leveraging collective expertise and data, and by sharing learnings, best practices and information about state law barriers,” they said.
“By proving we can provide high-quality acute care outside of a hospital building, we have turned on its head the notion of where patients with serious or complex conditions can be cared for,” Michael Maniaci, M.D., physician leader for advanced care at home at Mayo Clinic, said in a statement. “By further developing a nurturing policy landscape, we can advance the well-being of patients by catalyzing innovative, collaborative, knowledge-driven models to redefine the standard of high-acuity care that meets each person’s unique needs.”
The Advanced Care at Home Coalition is currently accepting new members, according to its website. The group is being managed by McDermott+Consulting.
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Mayo and Kaiser signaled their long-term ambitions for the hospital-at-home space in May with the announcement of a $100 million investment into Medically Home.
The systems said at the time that they would be massively scaling up their existing deployments of the company’s services—which include the installation and coordination of remote monitoring devices, emergency response systems and other medical equipment inside the patient’s home—across their service areas.
Both organizations said they were pleased with the early rollouts of Medically Home’s model, highlighting improved readmission rates, “extraordinarily low” complications and greater patient satisfaction scores.
“This model will finally allow underserved patients safe and cost-effective access to care that is long overdue,” Rami Karjian, CEO of Medically Home, said in a statement. “We look forward to working with Congress to expand access to this safe and effective model of care delivery.”
It's not the first coalition aimed at advancing home-based care. Amazon Care, Intermountain Healthcare and Ascension are founding members of the Moving Health Home coalition, which aims to change the way policymakers think about the home as a site of clinical service.
Other providers have also ramped up or launched new programs to deliver high-acuity care inside of patients’ homes.
Also in May, AdventHealth inked a deal with startup DispatchHealth to expand a Tampa, Florida-based deployment across Daytona Beach, Ocala and Orlando, as well as into the Kansas City metro area.
Detroit-based Henry Ford Health System announced just a few weeks back that it had partnered with Contessa—a provider of home recovery care services and recent subsidiary of Amedisys—to build and launch hospital-at-home, skilled nursing facility (SNF)-at-home and palliative-care-at-home programs for its communities.
That deal came around the same time that UnityPoint Health, one of the Advanced Care at Home Coalition’s newly announced members, said that it would be collaborating with healthcare and community care coordination technology company WellSky to flesh out its SNF-at-home program.