SNFs Shouldn’t Fight Rise of Home-Based Care

Some nursing home operators may fear the push towards home-based care as direct competition, with their facilities still recovering from low occupancy rates caused by the pandemic.

However, alternatives to traditional models — such as, Castell Health’s hospital-at-home program, which started in May 2020 and has admitted about 240 patients to date — have been shown to improve quality, lower costs, and boost patient satisfaction.

“In our experience, our costs are about 30% cheaper than the hospital alternative and the pandemic really exploited or accelerated the hospital-at-home model. A recent study suggests that three out of five seniors prefer to receive care in their home,” Christine Lipson, director of Home Services for Castell Health, said at The Synergy Summit 2021, sponsored by Synergy HCA and SRX.

Castell Health is owned by Intermountain Healthcare, a nonprofit system of 25 hospitals, 225 clinics and a medical group with locations in Idaho, Utah and Nevada.

While there is significant interest, excitement and investment in home health, as each of the presenters laid out on Tuesday, nursing homes still home a role to play in the post-acute care continuum.

“It’s not going to make anyone in this room obsolete,” Kerry Palakanis, executive director of Intermountain Healthcare, said. “What it may do is change the manner in which you’re providing care on a larger spectrum.”

Later in the day, Cory Christensen, the chief executive officer of Plum Healthcare Group, a skilled nursing company with over 50 facilities in California and Nevada that primarily focuses on higher-acuity residents, agreed with that sentiment.

“Home health is not a threat; it’s a partner in terms of the spectrum of care,” he said.

Rather than viewing it as competition to traditional models, the move to home-based care could be seen as a way to improve transitions within the post-acute care continuum.

“We’re really good at our silos, we’re really good at acute care within a hospital facility, we’re good at SNF care within a SNF, but what we’re not good at is weaving all those together and transitioning patients,” Lipson said. “I think that all of this development and excitement in the space is going to come around those transitions.”

Improving transitions, reducing unnecessary emergency room visits and hospitalizations and decreasing costs for the overall health care system is something that Denver-based home health provider organization DispatchHealth has been doing since its founding in 2013.

DispatchHealth now operates in 33 different markets across 18 different states and is able to treat the sickest of the sick inside the home.

It has reportedly seen over 300,000 patients in the home setting over the past seven years saving over $350 million in unnecessary ER visits, hospitalizations, and readmissions and works with skilled nursing facilities to intervene on patients as they transition out into the home, according to Kevin Riddleberger, chief strategy officer and co-founder of provider organization DispatchHealth.

Long-term care and post-acute needs will always be there, but adjusting to innovations in home-based care and not “running or fighting it,” as Forrest Peterson, President of Banera Healthcare put it, will be essential for SNFs moving forward.

“Being able to adjust as a partner and become what the hospital’\s need and listening to that versus fighting against it is key to battling the surge of home health,” he added. “I don’t know if there’s much we can do about it, and I’m okay with that because getting them home if they can go home is the right thing to do.”