Minnesota-based health system Allina Health has partnered with venture capital firm Flare Capital Partners to take its SNF-at-home and hospital-at-home programs to a national platform.
Allina and Flare Capital Partners announced a $20 million fundraising round on Tuesday for its new standalone company Inbound Health, a platform that enables health systems and health plans to offer at-home care programs.
The news comes at a time when the shift to home trend remains on the minds of nursing home providers and is a slowly growing part of the health care conversation.
The Inbound Health platform has been operational in Allina Health’s service area since May 2020, and has already served more than 4,200 patients across 185 primary diagnoses, according to a news release. Now Inbound Health is a separate company that will be able to scale nationwide, according to CEO Dave Kerwar.
Kerwar said SNF-at-home can be very effective for patients following a hospitalization or an elective surgery who have a medical complexity that might require facility-level skilled nursing care but a functional status that is conducive to care in the home.
“This program provides another option for patients who qualify given their clinical and functional status and can help our system reserve the brick-and-mortar SNF beds for the patients who need them the most,” Kerwar told Skilled Nursing News.
The latest fundraising will be used to continue to make advances in its technology platform, according to the release.
The company developed episodic-based payer contracts with multiple commercial and Medicare Advantage payers in Minnesota — a payment model the company plans on replicating with partners in other markets.
“We are excited for Inbound Health to leverage the capabilities and know-how that power these programs to scale similar at-home programs across the nation,” Allina Health President and CEO Lisa Shannon said in a statement.
As these programs continue to crop up across the country, skilled nursing operators need not worry about losing market share to the growing home trend.
But still, some operators may want to consider building out their own SNF-at-home programs.
“If you are a high quality SNF operator and you’re partnered with high quality, in demand health systems in one way or another, you’re always going to have a seat at the table,” Drake Jarman, senior vice president of growth and development for Contessa Health, said at the Skilled Nursing News RETHINK event in September.
Jarman said he sees the shifts to home-based care as an opportunity to diversify business lines in the future, as patient preference, Medicare Advantage (MA) plans and technology advancements make SNF-at-home an increasingly viable option.
SNF-at-home businesses might also be a draw for recruiting new talent, Fred Bentley, managing director at DC-based consulting firm ATI Advisory, said during the same event.
“This new opportunity is really giving them a new lease on life and bringing them back into the fold,” he said. “They’re not going from room-to-room but really home-to-home, less visits in a day, more meaningful interactions where you can really be a part of that healing process for the patient.”
Still, the trend is in its infancy, with limited numbers of eligible patients and barriers to home care, like the burdens placed on family members involved in SNF-at-home.
“This is very early days here. It’s a very small subset of the SNF patients, specifically,” Jarman said.
