The past few years have been a time of transformation for the hospital-at-home model. As it cements its popularity, new players have begun to rise with it.

While hospital at home has long been embraced across the globe — in Australia, Canada and across Europe, for example — the model popped up in the U.S. in the 1990s. That’s when Dr. Bruce Leff conducted a successful pilot trial.

Those trials found the total cost of care was 32% lower than brick-and-mortar hospital care. They also found that the mean length of stay of hospital-at-home programs was one-third shorter.

Home Health Care News explores the model further and profiles a few of the key emerging players in this HHCN+ exclusive report.

The case for hospital at home

Over the years, robust evidence has emerged from numerous studies on the effectiveness of the hospital-at-home model – on cost efficiency, medical outcomes and more.

A 2018 study conducted by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai found that hospital at home achieved shorter average lengths of stay compared to traditional in-patient care, at 3.2 days compared to 5.5 days, respectively.

The same study also found that the model significantly lowered rates of hospital readmissions and emergency department visits.

In 2020, another study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that the costs for patients receiving hospital-level care in the home were 38% lower. Researchers also found that these patients were less sedentary and had lower readmission rates within 30 days.

The hospital-at-home model has also shown promising results in the area of cancer care.

Traditionally, cancer care delivery takes place in brick-and-mortar facilities exclusively. This is also slowly beginning to change.

A 2021 study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found that an in-home cancer care model led to a 55% reduction in unplanned hospitalizations, with 47% lower costs.

Hospital-at-home roadblocks

Despite the evidence of hospital at home’s effectiveness, two major roadblocks have impeded the model’s widespread adoption.

One of these roadblocks is the cultural norms of health care in the U.S., and hospitals and health systems acting as gatekeepers resistant to change.

“It’s sort of the difference between understanding you need to change, knowing how to change and making the change, because some things are just so hardwired into systems,” Leff previously told HHCN. “Rewiring health care, health care delivery and attitudes — all of that is hard.”

In addition to being a pioneer in the U.S. hospital-at-home space, Leff is a geriatrician, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for transformative geriatric research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The other major barrier is the lack of a clear path to reimbursement. This is especially notable because, for potential hospital-at-home operators, setting up shop can be a costly and time-consuming endeavor when an organization doesn’t have the right resources or infrastructure in place, according to a recent report by Chilmark, a Boston-based health care research firm.

The path to reimbursement began to open up in 2020. At the time, the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced its Acute Hospital Care At Home program.

The CMS waiver program was a COVID-19 relief measure that allowed operators to receive payment for delivering care in the home when hospital capacity was stretched extremely thin.

The waiver has been a major game changer.

Currently, there are at least 125 health systems and 290 hospitals across 37 states approved to work under the CMS waiver. This doesn’t include the many operators that are providing care outside of the CMS waiver, of course.

Over the years, operators such as Contessa Health, DispatchHealth and Mount Sinai have positioned themselves as stalwarts in the hospital-at-home movement.

Still, the CMS waiver program was never meant to be permanent, which means that reimbursement could again become uncertain in the future.

In May, the public health emergency officially came to an end, taking with it many of the flexibilities that kept providers afloat during the height of the pandemic. However, the Acute Hospital Care At Home waiver has been extended until 2024.

Aside from cultural and reimbursement barriers, there are other challenges as well.

For one, providers need to have a consistent amount of patients admitted at any given time for their programs to remain sustainable.

Plus, internet and cellular connectivity remains an issue in some remote areas, the Chilmark report noted.

It’s sort of the difference between understanding you need to change, knowing how to change and making the change, because some things are just so hardwired into systems.

Dr. Bruce Leff of Johns Hopkins

The market’s big players

In recent years, companies that have been able to help partners implement or improve their hospital-at-home programs have become beneficiaries of the movement.

One of these companies is Inbound Health — an enablement platform that helps health systems and health plans develop high-acuity at-home care programs, including hospital at home.

“We bring all of the enablement capabilities that health systems need to launch and scale these programs,” Inbound Health CEO Dave Kerwar told HHCN. “That’s the care model, which we’ve now scaled to 6,000 different patients across 350 disease states. It’s a custom developed technology, an analytics platform. A proprietary platform we built specifically for the hospital-at-home and SNF-at-home care models.”

Originally under the Allina Health umbrella, Inbound Health spun off and became a separate entity last year.

For Inbound Health, being a high-acuity care enabler also means bringing supply chain, labor and logistics partners – as well as a machine learning analytics platform and an operations unit – to the table.

The company also helps its partners navigate reimbursement.

“We’ve created contracts with commercial and Medicare Advantage payers, and we have a replicable process we go through to be able to ensure that our health system customers get on contract so that they can be reimbursed for hospital-at-home care episodes,” Kerwar said.

When Inbound Health got started, the company had an average daily census of between five to 10 patients.

“We’ve quintupled that over the last three years,” Kerwar said. “Our average daily census is in the low 50s. We achieved this by creating a care model that was very deeply integrated into the clinical and operating workflow of the health systems we serve.”

More recently, Inbound Health expanded its services to include post-surgical care for general surgery, including orthopedics, bariatrics and hernia. This was a move to address hospitals and health systems’ capacity constraints.

In Kerwar’s view, the biggest question that remains is what the future of reimbursement looks like.

“We fully expect, given the excitement regulators have about this care model, that this will become a permanent payment model under the CMS benefit structure,” he said. “What we don’t know is exactly what it will look like, in terms of rates and requirements.”

Hospital-at-home unicorns

Biofourmis made waves when it surpassed what’s known in the startup world as unicorn status — a valuation at over $1 billion — last year when it raised a $300 million funding round.

The recent evolution of the company has been drastic, according to Kuldeep Singh Rajput, the CEO and founder of Biofourmis.

“We have truly evolved the company into a technology-enabled care delivery company,” he told HHCN. “Our focus is around how we deliver virtual care using a command center. How do we coordinate and deliver enhanced services — phlebotomy, DEM, infusion — all delivered into the patient’s home?”

Biofourmis was founded in Singapore back in 2015. The company’s U.S. offices are headquartered out of Boston.

As a company, Biofourmis has two main verticals. There’s Biofourmis Care, which is focused on care delivery across the continuum — managing post-acute and complex chronic care patients. The company leverages software and data science, along with clinical care teams, to deliver care virtually in the home.

The other segment of the company is focused on the pharmaceutical sector.

In its first year as a company, Biofourmis had seven health system partnerships under its belt. Today, that count is at roughly 60.

Rajput believes that Biofourmis’ value-add is helping its partners streamline their clinical workflows and reduce the fragmentation of point-of-care solutions.

“One of the biggest pain points for health systems is that with all of these digital tools and technologies, there’s a lot of fragmentation in the marketplace,” he said. “Hospital systems are certainly frustrated because of all these point-of-care solutions. They want to work with a partner that enables configuration of different care pathways, configuration of care continuum and acuity on a single platform.”

Infrastructure is still needed

Current Health has also gained strong momentum over the years as more health systems made moves to provide hospital at home, eventually catching the eye of Best Buy (NYSE: BBY). The electronics retail giant purchased the company in 2021.

“Current Health had our best commercial year ever after the acquisition,” Current Health CEO and co-founder Chris McGhee told HHCN. “Best Buy, through Geek Squad, has an entirely unique capability in the market to cross that final mile and go across the threshold into the patient’s home and support that individual with the technology, ensuring that the nurse or the doctor isn’t becoming IT support.”

Based in Boston, Current Health offers a platform equipped with remote care management, telehealth and patient engagement tools to help health care providers conduct at-home care, including hospital-at-home care.

Currently, the company holds upwards of a quarter of the U.S. hospital market, according to McGhee. 

The extra layer of support that Best Buy and Geek Squad offer the company has helped more patients receive care under hospital-at-home programs.

Looking ahead, McGhee believes the infrastructure around hospital at home will need to continue to grow in order for the model to continue progressing. 

“We as a society have spent trillions of dollars building up the infrastructure around the hospital, ​​making it possible within the electronic health record for us to admit a patient to the hospital with one click,” he said. “That is not the case today within the hospital-at-home market. We – as enablers, technology companies, hospitals, health systems and other partners in the space – have to collectively build up that infrastructure and make it easier to enroll and manage patients in these programs.”

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“The role of technology within health care is becoming more important than ever and our strategy is to enable care at home for everyone,” Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said Thursday during the company’s earnings call. “We also expect to drive a higher mix of our more profitable and unique service plans and deliver cost optimization in our active aging business.”

As is the case with many of its retail peers, home-based care and aging services have become a point of focus for Best Buy.

Current Health — Best Buy’s care-at-home technology platform — had its best commercial booking year ever in 2022, Barry said.

Current Health’s platform includes remote patient monitoring, telehealth, a full support model and patient engagement tools. The company partners with health care providers across the country.

“We now have relationships with five of the top 10 largest health systems in the U.S.,” Barry said. “These names include Geisinger, Mount Sinai Health System, NYU Langone Health and others. 40% of our provider clients were launched in Q4, demonstrating our momentum.”

Best Buy also recently signed on to a three-year partnership with Atrium Health. The partnership will leverage Advocate Health’s hospital-at-home program and Best Buy’s technology expertise, Barry said.

“We are excited about the momentum of care at home, but it is still a nascent emerging part of the health care industry,” Barry said. “We are essentially nurturing a startup within a large-scale organization and leveraging Best Buy’s core assets — including the Geek Squad — to incubate a new business. The revenue contribution is currently very small and will take time to ramp as the care at home space matures and expands over the coming years.”

Best Buy’s net income fell by 21% to $495 million in the fourth quarter from $626 million year-over-year.

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Despite this, there’s still a greater need for technology, support and financial reimbursement in order to propel these efforts forward, a new report from Current Health suggests.

“Our survey found that two-thirds of health system leaders are offering some type of care-at-home service, but plans for investing in these programs continue across the acuity spectrum,” Current Health CEO Christopher McCann told Home Health Care News in an email. “The insights we’ve seen from those who are offering this care reveals that how you design and operationalize these care models really matters. The depth of EHR integration, the process for enrolling patients, the experience you’re offering clinicians all have a significant effect on the results and benefits you see.” 

Based in Boston, Current Health has a software platform and a variety of connected devices that measure vital signs in the home and send data to health care providers. The organization surveyed more than 100 hospital and health system leaders for the report. Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) acquired Current Health last year.

Currently, more than half hospitals and health systems — 66% — offer some form of home-based care service, according to the report.

Offering these services have been a major value-add, in terms of patient experiences and outcomes, for hospitals and health systems. Leaders at these organizations cited decreased readmissions, decreased hospitalizations and decreased emergency room visits as some of the positive outcomes.

Still, many of these organizations are dealing with pain points related to offering care at home. Specifically, 95% of respondents identified staffing shortages as their top challenge. Furthermore, 58% of respondents said that hiring the right workforce is a major barrier to delivering care at home.

Other pain points for health care leaders were high costs, according to 74% of respondents, while 50% named reduced revenue. Rounding out the top five challenges, 36% of respondents identified limited capacity and 34% named “provider experiences and satisfaction.”

The report also found that technology was an essential part of offering home-based care. In fact, 54% of respondents said clinical monitoring support was the most important support service for care at home. Second was logistics support at 53%, while 48% said technical support.

Additionally, the report found that 70% of respondents believe that EHR integration is important when considering a care-at-home solution, and 78% reported that an enterprise-wide solution is crucial to delivering care in the home setting.

On this front, partnerships could be key to solving many of the current challenges, according to McCann.

“We’ve seen a continually growing appetite to move care home, but it will be partnerships that marry clinical, technical and operational expertise that fulfill the promises of these care models,” he said in a press statement.

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No one understands this better than Current Health, a company that has made enabling health care in the home its key area of focus.

“I think that there are two major barriers that come to mind,” Dr. Adam Wolfberg, chief medical officer at Current Health, told Home Health Care News. “As physicians, we learned how to take care of patients largely in person. The transition to taking care of patients virtually — leveraging data we can collect from platforms like Current Health — and interaction on telephone is still a sort of a new thing for physicians.”

Based in Boston, Current Health has a software platform and a variety of connected devices that measure vital signs in the home and send data to health care providers. Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) acquired Current Health last year.

Now, the company is a $400 million organization and a major part of Best Buy Health’s strategy. Current Health enables health systems such as Mount Sinai, Geisinger, Vanderbilt, HealthFirst, Parkland Hospital & Health System and UMass Memorial to deliver health care in the home.

Wolfberg believes that clinicians need to become more comfortable with the practice of delivering care in a virtual environment.

“I spend a lot of my time working with our clinicians to talk not about the deployment of technology, but the practice of medicine in a virtual environment,” he said. “I think that those conversations are ongoing at every health system that aspires to meet their patients where they are.”

The second barrier Wolfberg noted was that not all patients have the technical access to virtual care and RPM.

Solving the issue of lack of connectivity is one of Current Health’s value-adds as a company.

“We provide connectivity so that the patient can connect to their health care provider, whether or not they have a smartphone, whether or not they have home internet,” Wolfberg said. “Those sorts of technical barriers remain in place for many patients. We as an industry need to work on knocking those barriers down.”

Another barrier that Current Health is tackling through its services is language, according to Wolfberg.

“Not every patient speaks English, and not every patient who speaks English reads English, so our technology is available in dozens of languages,” he said. “We have team members on staff who are incredibly knowledgeable … and it’s not sending someone to a third party call center, we make sure we can solve problems for patients in real time.”

Being able to leverage Best Buy’s infrastructure has also allowed Current Health to beef up its services. The company’s plans to lean on Best Buy’s scale and resources.

“There’s a Best Buy big box store within 15 miles of 75% of the population in the United States,” Wolfberg said. “There are 20,000 Geek Squad members. We are working really hard to take advantage of that infrastructure that is in everybody’s backyard to make sure the devices, the knowledge and the services they need to keep care in the home are available to them anywhere. That’s one of the really exciting aspects of the merger that we’re going to be rolling out in the coming months.”

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In 2019, when I began covering home-based care, Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) was just barely scraping the surface in the space.

Paying $800 million for the senior-focused technology company GreatCall was nothing to scoff at, of course. But it wasn’t directly related. It certainly felt like much more was bubbling underneath the surface.

In the interim, other retailers have been full-speed ahead on the home-based care mission.

Walgreens Boots Alliance (Nasdaq: WBA) put $6.2 billion behind the home-focused primary care company VillageMD. It has also made other investments in home health care companies like BrightSpring Health Services and post-acute technology companies like CareCentrix.

CVS Health (NYSE: CVS) has experimented with at-home kidney care and even flirted with the idea of getting into traditional home health care.

Within a short span, Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) launched its own in-person and virtual care platform – Amazon Care – scaled it, and even pitched it to large insurers as the next big thing in home-focused care.

Walmart (NYSE: WMT) has continually acknowledged the importance of the home in its health care plans, and has adjusted its strategy to account for that.

Now, Best Buy has joined the race as well. And it’s positioning itself not as an adjacent player, but instead, squarely in the mix.

The question is now: Will the company be riding the wave to the home, or driving the tide?

I answer that and more in this week’s exclusive, members-only HHCN+ Update.

A shifting strategy for the home

“I was approached by Best Buy Health, and they asked for me to come join their team to really break down the barriers of how care is delivered,” Diana Gelston, the VP of virtual care sales, marketing and client success at Best Buy, told Home Health Care News. “And so I joined just over a year ago.”

Gelston was previously the VP of sales and clinical consulting at Fresenius Medical Care. Before that, she helmed U.S. health care sales for Amazon Business.

Best Buy’s pitch to her was prescient. Six months later, the company acquired Current Health for a reported $400 million.

The Boston-based Current Health is the exact type of platform a company would buy if it wanted to make an expedited entrance to home-based care. Its digital platform – which includes remote care management, telehealth and patient engagement tools – helps health care providers across the U.S. deliver home-based care.

Of late, Current Health has partnered with the Dallas Based Parkland Health & Hospital System, the New York-based Mount Sinai Health System and the Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic, among others. It also partnered with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which is part of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

“Best Buy Health has a mission to help enrich and save lives through technology and meaningful connection,” Chris McCann, the CEO and co-founder of Current Health, told HHCN in October. “As I’ve gotten to know their team, it became clear very early on that we shared a similar vision for the future of health care as well as a common understanding of the challenges of making the home a primary site of care.”

And Current Health is also not just tangentially related to the home-based care space. It is deeply embedded. It is also a part of Moving Health Home, a coalition started last year to advocate for favorable home-based care legislation in Washington, D.C.

Other Moving Health Home members include Amazon Care, Intermountain Healthcare, Amwell (NYSE: AMWL) and Home Instead.

“When I came here, I saw unique capabilities, a remarkable supply chain and the ability to scale a business to connect to the home and create a powerful virtual care experience,” Gelston said. “Think of what we offer from a Best Buy macro view – and the horsepower behind that – and then take that across the threshold, into the home, from a technology-enablement perspective. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

It isn’t just in-the-weeds executives like Gelston taking this leap anymore, either. The strategy has been vocalized from top down.

“A few of the pieces in this patient journey are still in development,” Best Buy President Deborah Di Sanzo said on the company’s Q4 earnings call. “[We’re] integrating The Geek Squad with Current Health, for example. But this is our direction. And you can see Best Buy is there for the patient with technology, support and connections to enable care at home.”

Di Sanzo reiterated this at the SXSW 2022 conference as well. Specifically, she cited that for a decade, retailers and others have been talking about the consumerization of health care, but it never came to fruition, truly, until the pandemic.

“It never really came,” she said. “Then the pandemic came and just took it home. Technology is moving into health, and health is moving into the home.”

Here’s the goal for Best Buy in the future, according to Gelston: connect patients to physicians, health systems and health insurers to provide – or facilitate – better outcomes through care in the home.

“It’s not caring for that patient, per se, but it’s enabling that care,” Gelston said.

So, drawing back to the prior question I posed, on whether Best Buy is riding the wave to the home or driving the tide. It turns out, in this case, it’s probably doing both.

For instance, CVS and Walgreens want to be intimately involved in driving the tide. They have the care delivery systems to do so.

Best Buy, on the other hand, is staying out of the hands-on care – for now. But its potential ability to enable care at a large scale is what could make it a very integral player in the shift to home-based care over the next decade.

As for future partnerships Best Buy has in the pipeline, or future acquisition targets, the company is keeping its lips sealed. But it did not rule out the possibility that its home-based care strategy includes a pipeline that’s ready to be capitalized on.

“We have a very formal business development rigors and processes,” Gelston said. “But you know, we’re always trying to build that ecosystem to make people as successful at home as possible with technology. So whether it’s through partnerships or not, I think that that’s what we’re trying to do – really fortify that ecosystem around the patient within their homes.”

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The goal of Current Health and Parkland’s hypertension monitoring program is to lower patient risk through regular engagement.

“Parkland correctly identified high blood pressure as an underlying cause of lots of illnesses in their underserved population,” Adam Wolfberg, chief medical officer of Current Health, told Home Health Care News. “High blood pressure is related to worsening heart disease, to increased risk of stroke, to a shortened lifespan and increased risk of death. Those risks can all be significantly reduced if patients are able to successfully control their high blood pressure.”

Based in Boston, Current Health offers a platform equipped with remote care management, telehealth and patient engagement tools to help health care providers conduct home-based care. Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) announced that it was acquiring Current Health last October.

Meanwhile, Dallas-based Parkland is an integrated health system.

As part of the program, Parkland will utilize Current Health to monitor patients’ blood pressure and other symptoms.

“[Patients] are sent home with the Current Health vital sign monitoring technology and a telehealth tool that allows them to interact with their health care providers,” Wolfberg said. “That access enables them to interact with their health care providers in a way that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.” 

Prior to the partnership, Parkland was working with blood pressure cuffs and paper diaries, which meant that feedback from the patients’ health care provider wouldn’t occur until their next appointment, according to Wolfberg.

“This way the data can move electronically to their health care provider who then can review it, interact with the [patient] by phone or by telehealth, change medication, provide support and recommendations on a nearly real-time basis,” he said.

Additionally, education is a focal point of the program.

“[Patients] receive education and support about their diagnosis,” Wolfberg said. “The education includes information about the importance of their medication and measuring their blood pressure. The education also talks about their diet and encourages activity.”

In general, the partnership between Current Health and Parkland should come as no surprise to those who have been following the home-based care space closely.

In fact, up to $265 billion worth of care services for Medicare fee-for-service and Medicare Advantage beneficiaries could shift to the home by 2025, according to a Mckinsey report.

One of the driving forces behind this larger shift to the home is the growth in virtual care. In February 2021, the use of telehealth was 38 times higher than it was before the public health emergency.

More than one in five health care leaders said that their practice offers remote patient monitoring.

Aside from Current Health’s partnership with Parkland, the company recently announced that it was teaming up with Zoom (Nasdaq: ZM). The company’s integration with Zoom will enable health systems and their patients to launch the video conferencing service from its care-at-home platform. 

“Our mission is to deliver quality care for all people in the most seamless ways possible,” Chris McCann, CEO and founder of Current Health, said in a statement. “We know that home-based care reduces complications for at-risk populations and cuts costs by 30% for health systems. With this Zoom integration, we aim to build upon these benefits by empowering health care providers to replicate the in-person experience in the home to deliver best of breed diagnosis and care at scale.”

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Along with the likes of Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) and Walmart (NYSE: WMT), Best Buy has been one of the retail giants that has steadily increased its interests in both health care and the home over the last few years.

In 2018, Best Buy acquired GreatCall — a company that specializes in helping seniors age in place through smart phones, medical alert devices and other technology – for $800 million. Since then, it has been mostly quiet on the acquisition front, but has still signaled through earnings calls that it remains focused on home-based health care.

Financial details of the Current Health deal, expected to close in the fourth quarter, were not disclosed.

“The future of consumer technology is directly connected to the future of health care,” Deborah Di Sanzo, the president of Best Buy Health, said in a press release announcing the news. “We have the distinct expertise in helping customers make technology work for them directly in their homes and by combining Current Health’s remote care management platform with our existing health products and services, we can create a holistic care ecosystem that shows up for someone across all of their health care needs.”

Based in Boston, Current Health offers a platform equipped with remote care management, telehealth and patient engagement tools to help health care providers conduct home-based care. The company has generated momentum over the last year through partnerships with health systems interested in expanding their hospital-at-home programs.

Current Health originally launched its model in the U.K. and has grown by over 3,000% since the beginning of 2020.

Following an announcement earlier this year that it had raised $43 million in Series B funding, the company was selected by UMass Memorial Health in June to help spearhead its own hospital-at-home program. It also has a partnership with the New York-based Mount Sinai Health System.

“Best Buy Health has a mission to help enrich and save lives through technology and meaningful connection,” Chris McCann, the CEO and co-founder of Current Health, told Home Health Care News in an email. “As I’ve gotten to know their team, it became clear very early on that we shared a similar vision for the future of health care as well as a common understanding of the challenges of making the home a primary site of care. “

McCann believes the synergy between Best Buy’s vision and Current Health’s made the acquisition logical, another sign that Best Buy sees the home as the best option for most health care services moving forward.

“Our focus is on building, growing and leading this amazing team and delivering health care at home globally,” he said. “We are excited to work with our new colleagues at Best Buy over the coming years to make this happen. Speaking personally, I have never been more excited about Current Health and the future we are creating.”

With Best Buy, McCann said that the company will be able to deliver even better services to its current clients, with the additional hope that new customers will come on board.

It’s unlikely that this will be the last move in this arena for Best Buy, as it has touted its technology’s applicability to in-home health care regularly.

“The pandemic has only served to underscore our purpose and strategy,” Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said on a recent earnings call. “The adoption of virtual care and telehealth by patients and physicians has been greatly accelerated by COVID-19 and is expected to continue to grow. We see significant opportunity over the long-term to make the experience much better for both patients and physicians by providing an integrated, seamless technology solution that is easy to use.”

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Elara Caring has named Ananth Mohan its chief operating officer.

“Ananth is joining Elara Caring at a time when his expertise is needed most,” Scott Powers, CEO of Elara Caring, said in a statement. “The addition of his strong health care operations background to our leadership team comes as our company is transitioning to a model that is fit for growth and entering a new period of innovation.”

Elara Caring is one of the 10 largest home health providers in the U.S., according to the Atlanta-based data and technology firm LexisNexis Risk Solutions. The Addison, Texas-based provider currently has about 225 offices across 16 states, where its 32,000 caregivers take care of around 65,000 patients daily.

In his new role, Mohan will oversee the company’s day-to-day administrative and operational functions.

Before joining Elara Caring, Mohan served as president of enterprise operations at Cancer Treatment Centers of America, a national network of cancer and patient care centers. Prior to that, he was an associate partner at McKinsey & Company.

“I am incredibly honored to join Elara Caring as in-home and patient care services are in higher demand than ever before,” Mohan said in a statement. “I’m excited to contribute right away and work with Scott and the team in strengthening and delivering our critical health care services when patients need the most.”

Two c-suite executives join Prospero Health

Prospero Health has made two key hires for its leadership team. The company has appointed Bill Kayser as chief financial officer and Robert Machen as chief information officer.

“Adding Bill and Robert to the Prospero family was a significant step for our young company,” Doug Wenners, co-founder and CEO of Prospero, said in a statement. “In order to serve more patients and their families across the United States, we prioritized strengthening our finance and technology teams. The expertise Bill and Robert bring in their respective fields has been invaluable and even more importantly, they both embrace the responsibility that everything we do is in service to people in our care.”

Boston-based Prospero Health is a physician-led home-based health care company that provides supportive care to people with advanced illnesses.

Overall, the company supports over 15,000 people across 26 states.

Previously, Kayser served as vice president of mergers and acquisitions, corporate strategy, and business development for McKesson Corporation.

Before joining Prospero, Machen was the chief operating officer of ALSAC/St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. He headed the organization’s digital transformation and global expansion.

Current Health beefs up executive team

Current Health has made three additions to its executive team.

Chris Pilkington has been named chief strategy officer, while Sarah Joyce was named chief customer officer. Lauren Levinsky was named vice president of marketing.

Current Health is a Boston-based company with a remote care technology platform that helps health care providers in offering home-based care.

In April, Current Health raised $43 million in a Series B funding round. At the time, the company said growing its team would be a priority, and that the new funds would help accelerate this goal.

“First and foremost, we intend to rapidly increase the size of our team,” Chris McCann, CEO, and co-founder at Current Health, previously told Home Health Care News. “We planned to more than double our headcount, just within 2021 — that’s about another 100 people. We expect to double our headcount again in 2022.”

Pilkington co-founded several digital health ventures and has held executive roles at payer organizations.

Previously, Joyce served as chief client officer at HealthcareSource.

Levinsky was a vice president at Kyruus, a patient access company.

Empath Health adds to senior leadership

Empath Health has made several additions to its leadership team.

Sarasota, Florida-based Empath Health provides home health, hospice and home care services, in addition to primary care, palliative care and more. Empath Health also runs a Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) operation.

The company named Saida Bouhamid chief mission financial officer and Lynne Craver chief mission implementation officer.

Additionally, the company has named Randal B. Currin Jr. chief mission strategy and integration officer, and Alan Weldy chief legal and mission excellence officer.

In March, Empath Health and Stratum Health System merged to form its current organization. These recent appointments support the newly structured organization.

“I am proud of the stellar qualities and expertise this leadership team brings to our organization, coupled with a deep understanding of our focus on the mission for serving our communities as a nonprofit,” Rafael J. Sciullo, CEO of Empath Health, said in a statement. “This team will help shape Empath Health’s next chapter, so we can serve even more people during some of the most challenging times of their lives.”

Dina appoints chief growth officer

Dina — an AI-powered care-at-home platform and network — has named Bob Maluso the company’s chief growth officer.

Dina is a Chicago-based company. Its platform helps agencies engage with patients more directly and enables caregivers to collect data from the home.

In his new role, Maluso will oversee Dina’s national sales and marketing efforts.

“Bob’s deep experience working with health plans will help us expand our role as convenors of home-based services and continue to bridge the gap between payers and providers,” Ashish V. Shah, CEO of Dina said in a statement. “His leadership will be instrumental to our growth in several key market segments: Medicare Advantage, Managed Medicaid and Risk-bearing Provider Organizations. We are delighted that he is joining us in our mission to support more people in their homes and communities.”

Before joining Dina, Maluso was senior vice president of business development and marketing at WoundTech, a technology-enabled wound management services company.

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That’s according to a recent survey conducted by Current Health, a Boston-based company with a remote care technology platform that helps health care providers in offering home-based care. For the survey, Current Health collected responses from 250 health system leaders between December 2020 and January 2021.

In light of the COVID-19 emergency, there has been more regulatory leeway around providing care in the home setting.

“COVID-19 certainly initiated the shift to broad remote healthcare delivery in the U.S., but the ongoing challenges presented by the variants continue to reinforce the importance of care outside the hospital moving forward,” Chris McCann, co-founder and CEO of Current Health, told Home Health Care News in an email. “The longer we go before a ‘post-pandemic health care,’ the more deeply integrated remote and home-based care will become.”

Last year, the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) introduced its “Acute Hospital Care At Home” wavier program. The CMS wavier — a COVID-19 relief measure — created a reimbursement opportunity for hospitals already working in the in-home care space, as well as those looking to enter for the first time.

More recently, the Choose Home Care Act of 2021 was introduced into the U.S. Senate in July. If signed into law, Choose Home would give home-based care providers the ability to offer personal care services, remote monitoring, meals support and other services to nursing home-eligible patients following a hospitalization.

As a response to these efforts to increase care in the home, health system leaders have set their sights on a number of key investment areas. The survey found that 64% of respondents plan to pool their resources toward home-based chronic care, while 60% are focused on hospital-at-home programs. Additionally, 58% of respondents said they are focused on transitional care.

In order to successfully implement these programs, health system leaders will need to be able to incorporate digital technologies, according to Current Health.

On the flip side, the health systems that have already incorporated remote care technologies to provide care have seen benefits.

Overall, 69% of respondents said they reduced hospital admissions, while 63% said they saw an improvement among their patients. A similar 62% reported patient satisfaction.

In addition to those benefits, remote care technologies have enhanced health systems’ workflows by enabling organizations to provide care that is proactive at scale, according to Current Health. About 66% of respondents said remote care technologies enabled their organizations to provide more preventive clinical care, while 60% said it helped them manage more patients overall.

More than two-thirds said it allowed them to prioritize which patients require clinical attention.

Despite the overall benefits, health systems have faced some roadblocks when it comes to implementing new technology and processes for home-based programs.

The majority of these challenges are related to engagement, operations and data, according to Current Health.

The survey found that 56% of respondents faced challenges around patient adoption and

adherence, with 48% having trouble enrolling patients in the program and 42% seeing challenges around adherence.

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Boston-based Current Health, a company that offers a remote care management platform to help health care providers conduct home-based care, has joined the Moving Health Home (MHH) coalition.

MHH was created in March to influence lawmakers and advocate for legislation favorable to all sorts of home-based care. Its member organizations are from a diverse set of home-based care backgrounds. They include Amazon Care (Nasdaq: AMZN), Intermountain Healthcare, Amwell (NYSE: AMWL), Home Instead Senior Care and more.

“We must learn from the lessons of COVID-19 to shape the future of health care,” Krista Drobac, the founder of MHH, said in a statement. “The pandemic taught us that care in the home is not only possible, but extremely valuable when it comes to delivering more accessible, holistic and preventive care. Current Health’s first-hand experience enabling care in the home will be beneficial as we design and champion a new paradigm for care delivery.”

Based in Washington, D.C, MHH now has 26 member organizations, according to a coalition spokesperson.

Other companies that are a part of the coalition include Landmark Health, Signify Health (NYSE: SGFY), DispatchHealth and Elara Caring.

On its end, Current Health has generated significant momentum over the last year, especially as hospitals attempt to provide hospital-level care in the home through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) “Acute Hospital Care at Home” waiver.

Most recently, the company was selected by UMass Memorial Health to help spearhead its new hospital-at-home program.

FirstLight Home Care joins Dina’s Network

FirstLight Home Care has joined Dina’s digital home care coordination network.

The Cincinnati-based home care provider, which has more than 200 locations across the country, is partnering with Dina in order to enhance coordination with its hospital and health plan partners.

On Dina’s end, its clients include home health care and non-medical home care providers. Its AI-powered care-at-home platform helps agencies engage with patients more directly and unlock “timely home-based insights” that can increase a senior’s “healthy days at home,” according to the company.

“Dina helps us position ourselves to partner with payers in the new world of expanded home-based care,” Kerri Pendley, VP of strategy at FirstLight Home Care, said in a statement. “The tools allow us to facilitate seamless referrals and integration of our home care services. Once activated, we can use outcome-based data to advocate on behalf of our clients for expanded services where needed.”

The partnership will be particularly beneficial to FirstLight, as its Medicare Advantage (MA) strategy has become an important part of its business initiatives over the last couple of years.

Minnesota selects HHAeXchange for EVV

The Minnesota Department of Human Services has chosen HHAeXchange — a provider of home care management solutions for payers and agencies — as its state-provided electronic visit verification (EVV) system.

The 21st Century Cures Act, which became law in 2016, came with an EVV mandate for all states. Thus, there are different EVV requirements for home-based care providers in different states.

The goal of the Cures Act was to decrease frause, waste and abuse within the home health industry.

“We are proud to have been chosen by the State of Minnesota to aggregate EVV data on its behalf,”HHAeXchange CEO Greg Strobel said in a statement. “We’re looking forward to providing a seamless offering for home care and self-direction providers that will help meet Minnesota’s goal of ensuring all people and communities can achieve optimal physical, mental and social well-being with access to quality care.”

The contract was officially awarded to the New York-based HHAeXchange in late May.

Minnesota is utilizing a hybrid EVV set-up, meaning that HHAeXchange will be consolidating all visit data, no matter which specific EVV tools are being used on the front end. Its platform will be used by around 112,000 workers serving over 80,000 patients, according to the company.

Axxess forms strategic partnership with Forcura

Dallas-based Axxess, a home health technology company, announced Monday that it had formed a strategic partnership with Jacksonville, Florida-based Forcura.

Forcura — also a frequent home-based care company partner — is a health care technology company that specifically helps enhance agencies’ electronic health record (EHR) technology. Its platform combines workflow and collaboration tools, third-party engagement capabilities and analytics to support providers across the continuum.

Thanks to the partnership, Axxess EHR clients will be able to process referrals and onboard patients up to 50% faster, according to a press release.

“Technology integrations like this partnership with Forcura are the key to transforming the delivery of care in the home,” John Olajide, founder and CEO of Axxess, said in a statement. “This enhanced experience will empower our clients to provide the best patient care, while lowering their administrative expenses and optimizing their revenue cycles.”

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