The investment was led by HealthQuest Capital. Existing investors – Flare Capital Partners and McKesson Ventures – also participated in this latest round of funding.

Inbound Health is an enablement platform that helps health systems and health plans develop hospital-at-home and SNF-at-home programs.

The company was originally part of the health system Allina Health. In 2022, the company spun off and became a separate entity. It launched with $20 million in funding from Flare Capital Partners.

Inbound Health CEO Dave Kerwar told Home Health Care News that there are three areas the new funds will be allocated toward. One of these areas is the company’s expansion into new markets.

“Some of the funding will capitalize us so that we can expand to those new markets and achieve the goals and the commitments we’ve made to those health system customers,” he said.

Over the course of the next six months, Inbound Health hopes to expand into two new markets, followed by a handful of additional markets throughout 2024.

The funds will also be earmarked for the continued development of Inbound Health’s clinical program.

“We’ve built a pretty impressive care model, to date, but there’s always opportunities to continue to be able to advance that by integrating new types of therapy, supply chains, care processes and people,” Kerwar said. “We’re going to be spending some time on the care model redesign, or care model advancement.”

The third area the new funds will go toward is the evolution of the company’s technology platform.

“We have deep analytics that are essentially learning models,” Kerwar said. “These analytics assist in the decisions that need to be made. They can assist a clinical liaison, for instance, or a nurse practitioner, when he or she is looking at a patient to identify opportunities, where they may be a good candidate for our care model, or not. We are continuing to invest on the analytic side, so that our staff can be operating as efficiently and as effectively as possible.”

Kerwar noted that while analytics is an additional tool that Inbound Health leverages to improve care, it’s not a substitute for actual clinicians.

“Those decisions are always 100% made by a licensed clinician, both on our side and the health system side,” he said. “We don’t look to analytics to replace any kind of a person, but they can help in the decision making.”

Garheng Kong, managing partner at HealthQuest Capital, believes that Inbound Health has carved out an indispensable role in the overall health care system.

“Inbound Health’s innovative solution addresses a pressing need within our health care system by enabling patients to receive high-quality care in the comfort of their homes, thereby enhancing the overall patient experience, and creating a solution that benefits all stakeholders,” he said in a statement. “This is especially vital in light of the growing capacity challenges faced by hospitals. We believe in the team’s ability to replicate and expand in future markets, making a substantial impact on health care delivery.”

Looking ahead, Kerwar sees limited barriers to growth for Inbound Health.

“We’re pleased with the amount of interest that I think all constituents — health systems, health plans, family members, regulators — have in this care model,” he said.

That said, the company is keeping an eye on the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) decision on the Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver.

“We’re looking forward to this type of the benefit, where advanced care can be delivered in the home, being part of a more permanent benefit structure that’s offered to Americans that are on fee-for-service Medicare,” Kerwar said.

The post Hospital-At-Home Enabler Inbound Health Closes $30 Million Funding Round appeared first on Home Health Care News.

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.”

The post HHCN+ Report: The Booming Hospital-At-Home Market’s Big Winners appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Whether its food, fashion or transportation, startups are known for playing the role of disruptor in whatever sector they’re operating in. 

While disruption can lead to innovation and efficiency, it’s also important for startups operating in senior care and home-based care to have a sound business model, healthy funding, strong backers, a clear value-add, advantageous partnerships and proper wherewithal to fully integrate into the space.

Home Health Care News did a deep dive into the standout startups that have cemented themselves in the senior care and home-based care space in recent years.

These companies have the above mentioned characteristics and more, making each one a startup to watch in 2023 and beyond.

Homethrive

At a time when aging in place is the established preference among seniors, Homethrive has cropped up as an aging-in-place enabler.

Homethrive’s staff of social workers provides clients with comprehensive care plans, as well as coaching, personal assistance and concierge services.

“One of the most common things [we do] is we help people understand the differences between ‘skilled’ and ‘non-skilled’ home care, helping them access that,” Homethrive co-founder and co-CEO Dave Jacobs previously told Home Health Care News. “That’s one of the most common things people come to us for, in terms of services. We are very much a partner for home care [agencies] across the country.”

The company was originally launched in 2018. Jacobs and his business partner David Greenberg were inspired by their own challenges with caregiving for their parents.

They brought their extensive health care backgrounds to this venture, having both been executives at the health care products company Medline Industries previously.

“Despite the fact that we were health care executives with a lot of knowledge of the industry, and were fortunate to have close families and the means to support our families, the caregiving journey was incredibly challenging,” Jacobs, previously told HHCN. “It was difficult.”

The Northbrook, Illinois-based company works with home care agencies, long-term care insurance companies and Medicare Advantage plans. Homethrive is also offered as a benefit at companies like Michigan Manufacturers Association, law firm McDermott Will & Emery and health-tech startup Emids.

In 2020, Homethrive raised $18 million, led by venture capital firm 7wireVentures and investment firm Pitango HealthTech.

At the time, Jacobs earmarked the funds to be used for a number of avenues that would push the company forward.

“We’re going to accelerate our penetration into health plans and also accelerate our penetration into the self-insured employer market,” he said. “Additionally, we are investing considerably to build out the technology stack that will power the service we provide to those different markets.”

Two years later, Homethrive raised an additional $20 million, led by Human Capital. Allianz, 7wireVentures and Pitango HealthTech also participated.

This new round of funding would help fuel what the company considers an “aggressive” plan to expand, as well as to accelerate its technology investments, specifically its digital assistant.

MedArrive

Already one of the “most successful” startups in the home-based care arena, MedArrive is certainly one to watch.

The New York-based company coordinates and delivers care in the home. MedArrive works with health systems and health plans to enable home-based care, utilizing non-traditional workers on the way, such as emergency medical services (EMS) professionals.

The company was founded in 2020 — Dan Trigub, the former head of Uber Health, and a former member of Lyft’s health care arm – is its CEO. MedArrive launched with $4.5 million in seed funding. .

“At the end of the day, Uber is a massive technology company with lots and lots of competing priorities,” Trigub told HHCN at the time. “I don’t think anyone would disagree, but it’s really not a health care company as its primary initiative. For me, I really wanted the opportunity to do more in health care.”

He founded the company with Inna Plumb, MedArrive’s COO, with the backing of Redesign Health, Kleiner Perkins and Define Ventures.

“I convinced Redesign, we went through our investment committee process to provide our seed stage funding.” Plumb said during an episode of HHCN+ TALKS last year. “We got to know CEO Dan Trigub. We clicked really well and the rest is history. We raised our seed from Redesign and then went on to raise an extension from Kleiner Perkins and Define Ventures, and then closed our Series A at the end of 2021. That’s our story.”

Plumb’s background includes a career in finance as an investment banker. She also spent time at the meal kit service company Blue Apron (NYSE: APRN).

Since its launch, the company has been able to lock down numerous strategic partnerships with companies such as Health Net, Superior HealthPlan, Brave Health and Spect.

“Partnerships sound really sexy, but at the end of the day, they have to serve a purpose,” Plumb said. “We really let the population and the needs of the population dictate what partnerships we form. When we identify a need within a population, then we go out and find the best possible partner there.”

MedArrive has also prioritized geographic expansion over the years. Currently, the company has nationwide capabilities, but is mostly focused in Florida, Texas, California and North Carolina.

More recently, MedArrive secured $8 million in funding this past April. Overall, the company has raised more than $40 million since it officially launched.

Inbound Health

As an off-shoot of Allina Health, Inbound Health is a hospital-at-home and SNF-at-home enablement platform.

Last year, Inbound Health became a separate entity, and launched with $20 million in funding from Flare Capital Partners.

“We started this internally within Allina Health,” Inbound Health CEO Dave Kerwar previously told HHCN. “As we built out our platform, it became probably one of the largest programs in the country. We designed it in such a way that it could be essentially multi-tenant. We could do this not just for Allina, but other health systems, too.”

As part of its business model, the company works with health plans and health systems that are developing, or have up-and-running, hospital-at-home or SNF-at-home programs. When working with these partners, Inbound Health offers up the care model, clinical leaders, a technology platform that includes a workflow layer, a virtual command center made up of biometric monitoring nurses, triage nurses and virtual hospitalists.

Additionally, Inbound Health’s capabilities also include supply chain, labor and logistics partners, a machine learning analytics platform, an operations unit and a payer-contracting capability for health systems.

“We bring all those capabilities, but most of the health systems and health plans we talk to have some, if not all of those ingredients,” Kerwar said. “Our operating model allows us, over time, to turn on or off those capability sets, so our health systems can look at us as a flexible partner.”

Compared to other startups on this list, Inbound Health is still more local, but its aim is to expand its reach. The company is looking to lock down more partners in other markets. Currently, it counts Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota as one of its health plan partners.

As part of its growth strategy, the company recently expanded to include post-surgical care for general surgery earlier this month. This move creates value for potential hospital partners, according to Kerwar.

“ORs across the country are essentially getting backed up, and their ability to increase the elective surgery count is getting constrained,” he said. “This is because there’s no brick-and-mortar skilled nursing facility bed for the patient to step down to.”

DUOS

DUOS first appeared in the senior care scene in 2020. It had $6 million in seed funding from investors Redesign Health and Forerunner Ventures, as well as a relationship with Magellan Health Inc. (Nasdaq: MGLN).

DUOS is a New York-based company that helps place expert personal assistants — “Duos” — into the homes of older adults. The company engages with the seniors through Medicare Advantage (MA) plans and dual-eligible plans in order to help them age in place.

In addition to working with payer and provider organizations, DUOS is also direct to consumer.

Last year, when the company raised $15 million, led by Imaginary Ventures, it set its sights on growth and technology advancements.

“The funding itself will be used to continue to build out our incredible team from a product engineering and design standpoint,” DUOS CEO Karl Ulfers previously told HHCN. “In terms of what we’re focused on with them, we really want to be a leader in technology for the older adult and caregiving space.”

Ultimately, the company is one to watch because it’s been able to gain a foothold with MA plans who are looking to retain members in a market crowded with available plan options.

“That’s creating churn within their business,” Ulfers said at the Home Care 100 conference in February. “They’re looking for solutions like ours to help them be engaged in those benefits, so they stay on the benefits longer.”

Tomorrow Health

When Tomorrow Health first launched, its business model drew comparison to online retail giant Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN).

Since then, the company announced that it was revamping its business model. In May, Tomorrow Health announced its plans to shut down its medical supply business. It would shift focus to technology and other solutions.

However, the company still plans on working with its home medical equipment (HME) supplier partners.

“HME suppliers are a critical lever to shift care to the home, which is often overlooked by payers,” Tomorrow Health CEO and co-founder Vijay Kedar said in a press statement at the time. “Tomorrow Health’s technology and unique position with payers enables change end to end, supporting everything from prescription to reimbursement while arming suppliers with valuable insights that can drive business growth and ensure positive experiences for every single stakeholder.”

Seeing what Tomorrow Health plans to do next is reason enough for the company to make this list, but it also has an impressive past track record.

Since launching, the New York-based company has secured $92.5 million in funding. Tomorrow Health also works with a big network of providers, as well as 125 health plans and health systems.

The company also has a long list of backers, including Andreessen Horowitz, BOND and Obvious Ventures and more.

Plus, Tomorrow Health rolled out a product that is meant to help providers in the Medicaid and home- and community-based services space in May.

Looking ahead, the company sees this restructuring of its business model as a way to “unlock new opportunities” and lift roadblocks for its home-based care provider network.

The post 5 In-Home Care Startups To Watch In 2023 appeared first on Home Health Care News.

The company’s home hospital care program will now include orthopedics, bariatrics and hernia as part of this expansion. One of the main goals is to help solve a major pain point for hospitals, Inbound Health CEO Dave Kerwar told Home Health Care News.

“ORs across the country are essentially getting backed up, and their ability to increase the elective surgery count is getting constrained,” he said. “This is because there’s no brick-and-mortar skilled nursing facility bed for the patient to step down to.”

As a company, Inbound Health was originally under the Allina Health umbrella. Last year, the company spun off and became a separate entity.

Inbound Health launched with $20 million in funding from Flare Capital Partners.

Before he took the helm of Inbound, Kerwar was the chief product officer at Mount Sinai Health System. Kerwar’s time at the health system taught him that general, or elective surgeries, are the financial lifeblood of these types of organizations.

“That’s where a lot of profit is gained,” he said. “It’s what really allows a health system to be financially sustainable. When you can’t increase your elective surgery rate, it constrains your ability to run a financially sustainable health system. Our program now uniquely solves that problem.”

Inbound began developing this expansion effort roughly 18 months ago, inspired by the boost of patient volume after COVID-19 surgery restrictions were lifted.

Through its expanded offerings, Inbound takes on patients who have received general surgery.

Sometimes, this means meeting patients at the end of their surgery in an ambulatory surgery center, allowing them to recover in their home. Other times, this means that Inbound is meeting patients at the end of the surgery in an acute care setting, shortening their length of stay in the hospital by allowing them to recover at home.

“That does two things,” Kerwar said. “One is it frees up beds in the hospital for higher-acuity cases, and it lowers the length of stay for patients that are otherwise in the hospital waiting for a skilled nursing facility bed to free up. As we talk to health systems around the country, having a comprehensive solution that allows for surgeries to shift from inpatient to outpatient, and allows patients to leave the hospital sooner, is a really attractive capability from both a clinical quality perspective and a financial perspective.”

In order to help health systems and hospitals relieve this pain point, Inbound brings a full stack of capabilities.

“We bring the care model, which now includes these surgical care models,” Kerwar said. “We bring the clinical leadership, we bring a technology and analytics platform, and we bring all the supply chain and the labor that is required — not just virtual labor, but in-home labor. We also bring the payment model. We negotiate with the private payers, commercial and Medicare Advantage payers, on behalf of the health system, to help them get a sustainable reimbursement for this model.”

Additionally, Inbound supplies a virtual command center that includes biometric monitoring nurses that are watching over patients and 24/7 triage nurses who are looking to identify the next best action of care. The company also brings local market staff.

Prior to working with a health system, Inbound scopes out a 12-month path to financial ROI for the organization.

“We put our fees at risk against that,” Kerwar said. “Our model is pretty simple; we charge a per episode rate. We put a good portion of that per episode rate at risk. We only receive the contingent part of that payment if we can help them achieve their strategic objectives that we set out before the contract is signed.”

Looking ahead, Kerwar believes that the program will only continue to accelerate.

“This is the future of how care will be delivered,” he said. “We’re excited to be running one of the largest programs in the country. We’re also excited that we’ll be scaling to at least two additional markets, and potentially two to three additional health systems, this year.”

The post Inbound Health Expands Into In-Home Post-Surgical Care For Elective Surgery appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Prior to Inbound Health, this level of care didn’t exist at Allina Health.

“They had a home health division with traditional 60-day visits,” Inbound Health CEO Dave Kerwar told Home Health Care News. “They were never actually taking patients and replacing either a hospital stay or a skilled nursing facility stay. The platform we created is everything from the care model to embedded clinical workflows across 350 different disease states. The operating model is essentially the playbook for how an entire episode of care should operate.”

As a company, Inbound Health was originally under the Allina Health umbrella. Last year, the company spun-off and became a separate entity. Inbound Health launched with $20 million in funding from Flare Capital Partners.

“We started this internally within Allina Health,” Kerwar said. “As we built out our platform, it became probably one of the largest programs in the country. We designed it in such a way that it could be essentially multi-tenant. We could do this not just for Allina, but other health systems too.”

At its core, Inbound Health is an enablement platform. The company works with health systems and health plans that are in various stages of development with their hospital-at-home or SNF-at-home programs.

“They may have some or none of the ingredients we have on our side — the full stack of capabilities that a health system or health plan needs to launch those programs,” Kerwar said.

This means the care model, clinical leaders, a technology platform that includes a workflow layer, a virtual command center made up of biometric monitoring nurses, triage nurses and virtual hospitalists.

Inbound Health’s also has supply chain, labor and logistics partners, a machine learning analytics platform, an operations unit and a payer-contracting capability for health systems.

“We bring all those capabilities, but most of the health systems and health plans we talk to have some, if not all of those ingredients,” Kerwar said. “Our operating model allows us, over time, to turn on or off those capability sets, so our health systems can look at us as a flexible partner.”

As for its work with Allina Health, Inbound Health has been able to achieve similar – or improved – clinical outcomes when compared to traditional facility-based care, according to Kerwar.

Inbound Health has also been able to help Allina Health lower total cost of care by 30-40% on a risk-adjusted basis.

In addition to working with Allina Health, Inbound Health has recently formed partnerships with health plans, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota.

Looking ahead, Inbound Health plans on going after more health plan partners in other markets.Ultimately, it is looking to take on more risk.

“Inbound Health will help its health system partners assume risk over a population, or over a larger time frame of episode of care, so we won’t just be paid fee for service for these types of episodes, but will be compensated based on our performance to achieve cost savings,” Kerwar said.

The post How Inbound Health Became The Hospital-At-Home ‘Ingredient’ For Health Plans, Health Systems appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Inbound Health has been around since May 2020 under the Allina Health umbrella in the Minneapolis area. Now, thanks to financial support from Flare Capital Partners, Inbound Health is growing beyond Minnesota and taking its platform elsewhere.

Specifically, Inbound launches with $20 million in initial investment.

“We’re taking our experience in Minneapolis: the care model, the clinical leadership, the technology platform we built, the analytics that are AI-driven and the partnership model. And we’re bringing that to other markets nationwide,” Inbound Health’s CEO David Kerwar told Home Health Care News. “As we started conversations with health systems around the country, it’s clear that this level of care — both hospital and skilled nursing — is something patients and health systems are looking for.”

Initially, Inbound Health was launched as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The program quickly was able to help serve over 180 diagnoses in the home and more than 4,200 patients.

Inbound Health partners with health systems that are typically in large markets that already have some sort of home-based care workforce.

What the startup hopes to do is bring a full stack of capabilities to fill the gaps for a health system. Those services can range from sending nurses and physical therapists into a home, to mobile labs and imaging.

“Then we’re wrapping that with virtual care that’s provided by Inbound,” Kerwar said. “We provide all the technology that’s required for that. Everything from the biometric devices, to the engagement apps that we give to the patients and their family members. All of that is on top of the workflow platform that we offer in order to design and manage the entire care episode.”

On Flare Capital’s end, the company backs a bevy of health care companies, including the likes of Bright Health Group, Eden Health and Iora Health.

Before joining Inbound Health, Kerwar was the chief product officer at Mount Sinai Health System, where he built a digital-first capability to help power the company’s population health programs.

Because regulatory uncertainty lingers around hospital at home, there was some relief when the public health emergency (PHE) was extended last week.

During the PHE, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) created the Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver, which gave hospitals, health systems and other home-based care providers the ability to provide – or help provide – hospital-level care in the home.

Inbound Health is not leveraging any hospital-at-home waiver in Minneapolis today and doesn’t currently plan on using the CMS one in the near-term future, Kerwar said.

“Mostly because the care model doesn’t necessarily work with what we’re doing here in the Twin Cities,” Kerwar said. “We’re not averse to it, but from what we can see, most health systems actually aren’t using the waiver. We know it’s temporary, we know it’s going to be replaced and we’re excited and anxious for CMS to announce what they’ll be doing with the Medicare fee-for-service membership and what kind of benefit they will package in the next year or two.”

Inbound Health has been focused on the commercial and Medicare Advantage base of patients, and will bill episodically for at-home and virtual visits.

For now, Inbound plans to expand to three or four sizable markets in the next year. Eventually, Kerwar expects the startup to be in 15 markets in the next three to four years.

“We’re really excited about the partnerships we’re developing and some of the investment we’re going to be taking from supply chain partners,” he said. “We’re actually building a whole side of our platform that’s going to connect with labor that wants to work on more of a contingent, almost like a gig worker, that will help us with this care model. We think that’s going to be pretty powerful as a way to be able to solve some of the labor problems that our partners are finding.”

The post Once A Response To COVID-19, Hospital-At-Home Startup Inbound Health Going National appeared first on Home Health Care News.