BrightSpring Health Services completes Haven Hospice acquisition

BrightSpring Health Services (Nasdaq: BTSG) announced earlier this month that it has finalized its $60 million acquisition of the assets of North Central Hospice and Haven Medical Group, which collectively make up Haven Hospice.

The deal was first announced in June, and was finalized as of Sept. 1.

Importantly, the deal helps BrightSpring bolster its hospice footprint in Florida, which is a Certificate of Need (CON) state.

“We are excited to welcome Haven Hospice into BrightSpring, expanding our existing hospice services into the CON state of Florida,” BrightSpring President and CEO Jon Rousseau said in a statement. “The delivery of compassionate hospice care is critical for patients and their families, and we’re committed to delivering that to high-need Floridians. Our hospice services have been rated in the top five percent for quality in the industry, and with this expansion of services to Florida, we can provide high-quality care to more patients and their families during the most difficult time in their lives.”

BrightSpring, since going public earlier this year, has been an active acquirer. The Louisville, Kentucky-based company provides a wide range of home-based care services across all 50 states.

Compassus, OhioHealth finalize partnership

Compassus – one of the largest home health providers in the country – has finalized its partnership with OhioHealth.

Under the partnership, Compassus has acquired ownership interest in four home health locations and three hospice locations that were formerly led and managed by Ohio Health, which is a large nonprofit health system.

The partnership between the two will be dubbed OhioHealth at Home in partnership with Compassus. It was originally announced in June.

“We are excited to officially launch OhioHealth at Home in partnership with Compassus, bringing high-quality, patient-centered home health and hospice care to our communities,” Compassus CEO Mike Asselta said in a statement. “Our coordination with the community and OhioHealth hospitals in Marion, central Ohio Lexington and Athens will ensure patients receive seamless, comprehensive care right in the comfort of their homes.”

Compassus provides home health, home infusion, palliative, hospice and home care services across 30 states.

One of its main growth drivers over the years has been joint ventures and partnerships with large, regional health systems like OhioHealth.

Agape Care Group bolsters hospice footprint in four states

Agape Care Group, which is a portfolio company of Ridgemont Equity Partners, has acquired Crossroads Hospice locations in Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas and Georgia.

Based in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Agape provides home-based hospice and palliative care services. Its family of brands already provided care across South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma and Virginia.

Crossroads Hospice will continue operating independently in Tennessee, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

“The addition of Crossroads Hospice solidifies our decision to expand into the Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma markets, where we have spent more than a year building the infrastructure to support this acquisition,” Agape Care Group CEO Troy Yarborough said in a statement. “We welcome the talented team members from Crossroads and look forward to focusing on care delivery and better serving patients in the Kansas City, St. Louis, Lenexa, Warrensburg, Oklahoma City and Atlanta markets.”

Advanced Home Health Care acquires Mobile Nursing Services

Advanced Home Health Care earlier this month announced that it has agreed to acquire Mobile Nursing Services, a home health provider based in Fort Madison, Iowa.

Based in Burlington, Iowa, Advanced Home Health Care provides services across the Southeastern part of the state.

“The acquisition allows Advanced Home Health to consolidate resources and provide the high-level of services both Advanced Home Health and Mobile Nursing customers rely upon to stay at home,” according to local news reports.

Advanced Home Health provides a variety of services in the home, including home care, home health care and pediatric care.

Cardinal Health to buy Integrated Oncology Network for $1.1 billion

Cardinal Health (NYSE: CAH) announced last week that it has agreed to acquire Integrated Oncology Network (ION), which is a physician-led independent oncology network. The deal is worth $1.115 billion.

Based in Dublin, Ohio, Cardinal Health is one of the largest health care companies in the country. Of late, it has significantly expanded its At-Home Solutions business. Now, it is diving deeper into oncology, which has also shifted further toward home- and community-based settings in recent years.

ION has more than 50 locations across the country. It provides “a complete and integrated continuum of care,” including diagnostic testing, radiation oncology, medical oncology, urology and other ancillary services.

As part of the transaction, ION will become part of Navista, Cardinal Health’s oncology practice alliance.

“Driving growth in specialty continues to be a top priority, and we’ve made investments to expand our offerings through both Navista and our acquisition of Specialty Networks,” Cardinal Health CEO Jason Hollar said in a statement. “With their proven model providing extensive support of community oncology across the cancer care continuum and healthcare ecosystem, we’re confident Integrated Oncology Network will further accelerate our oncology strategy and enable us to create value for providers and patients.”

Part of ION’s business model is “meeting patients where they are.”

“Integrated Oncology Network and Cardinal Health share a mission of helping community oncology practices deliver world-class patient care and a world-class patient experience to patients and families close to home,” ION CEO Barry Tanner said in a statement. “This partnership will give community practices the tools and technology they need to enhance and grow that mission and make a positive impact on patient outcomes.”

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The Greenville, South Carolina location fills a critical gap in the company’s distribution, Jamie Deist, vice president of warehouse operations for Cardinal Health at-Home, told Home Health Care News.

“We had some gaps between our North Carolina, Florida and Ohio facilities, and even more importantly, we knew we needed to be in the southeast, given the growing population,” he said. “Greenville gives us access also to nearby growing metropolitan areas like Atlanta, Charlotte, even up in Nashville.”

Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal is a distributor of pharmaceuticals and a manufacturer and distributor of medical and laboratory products. The company’s at-home business unit offers direct-to-home fulfillment and distribution services in the home medical equipment (HME) space, as well as in home health and hospice.

The company has made moves to cement itself in the home-based care space through various partnerships.

In 2022, Cardinal launched a supply chain pilot program with Medically Home.

Last year, Cardinal partnered with Signify Health to offer in-home clinical and medication management services.

Currently, Cardinal has 11 distribution centers spread across New Jersey, North Carolina, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Texas, California, Oregon and South Carolina.

The company’s Greenville location is 350,000 square feet. It is the second time the company has built from the ground-up.

Deist noted that Greenville was strategically selected based on its long history of manufacturing and distribution.

“There’s skilled labor in the market that we can reach out to and help set us up for success,” he said.

This latest distribution also positions Cardinal to meet the growing demand for home-based care.

“When we think about the population that we service — patients with chronic illnesses or ones in critical conditions — we need to be set up for that growth as they age,” Deist said. “Within our business, we have seen significant growth over the past decade, and we expect it into the future. We need this space to grow across all of our product categories.”

Cardinal considers this warehouse its distribution center of the future, according to Deist.

“We have not only designed and built it to our future needs, it also comes with some heavy automation use, as well to make sure we’re able to grow in this area over the coming years,” he said. “It also provides our employees an opportunity to be as productive and efficient with high-quality standards given the automation that we’ve invested in.”

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At the same time, Cardinal Health is also making major strides in its overall mission to be a driver of at-home care.

Broadly, Velocare technicians deliver hospital-grade products and services to patients’ homes. The company touts its ability to make these deliveries in under 2 hours.

Velocare officially launched its first post-pilot customer in March 2023. Since then, the company has partnered with hospital-at-home programs at 12 hospitals and health systems across: Portland, Oregon; Atlanta; Knoxville, Tennessee; New Haven, Connecticut; Boston and more.

“I would say there’s not one prototypical customer that we work with,” Alex Hoopes, senior director of strategy and execution for Cardinal Health’s Velocare, told Home Health Care News. “We work with large academic medical centers. We work with nonprofits and for-profits. We work with health systems that have taken their very first hospital-at-home patient, and we’ve been able to step in and support some hospital-at-home programs that have been up and running for a while, and are looking for the right partner to help them kick into their higher stage of growth.”

Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal Health is a distributor of pharmaceuticals and a manufacturer and distributor of medical and laboratory products. The company’s at-home business unit offers direct-to-home fulfillment and distribution services in the home medical equipment (HME) space, as well as in home health and hospice.

In general, Hoopes credits the wider spread adoption of the hospital-at-home model for Velocare’s growth.

“More patients need higher-acuity care, especially with an aging baby boomer population and especially in urban areas,” he said. “A lot of hospitals are facing really serious capacity issues. You hear a lot of stories of patients who basically have to get boarded in the ER because there aren’t beds available. Health systems are looking for ways that they can increase their capacity in a quicker – and more cost effective – timeline than building another wing of a hospital.”

More specifically, Hoopes points out that Velocare addresses a lot of the pain points that health systems experience when they are trying to stand up and scale a hospital-at-home program.

“We help contain costs with this model, as lots of goods and services need to be delivered outside of the four walls of a physical hospital, and we help dramatically improve the reliability and quality of the supply chain in ensuring things get to where they need to be on time, so that the patient’s plan of care can be executed exactly the way it was intended,” he said.

Aside from health systems and hospitals, Velocare has also received interest from payers that are doing direct care delivery and view hospital-at-home as an effective way to help drive patient outcomes and address high costs associated with traditional inpatient care.

Still, hospital-at-home is a fast-moving and dynamic model. This has meant that Velocare has needed to be able to quickly adapt to change.

“I think that introduces some good growing pains for us,” Hoopes said. “It’s about figuring out how we continue to expand what we do to offer more value and provide more support to the health systems that we’re working with.”

Hoopes is also thinking ahead to what the market will look like once the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver expires at the end of the year.

“I do think the toothpaste is out of the tube, and hospital-at-home is here to stay,” he said. “The fact that there’s a renewal that’s going to have to come up at the end of this calendar year, and not knowing what that renewal is going to look like, is something that we’re all dealing with.”

Even with an uncertain future for the waiver program, Cardinal Health has expansion plans for Velocare.

Part of that means growing with Velocare’s current client base.

“A lot of the programs that we work with today are still early in their journey, and will be pushing the amount of patients they take through this care model fairly aggressively, and growing their census, so we want to grow with our existing customers first and foremost,” Hoopes said.

Overall, Velocare has made 7,800 deliveries in the home.

Velocare is also focused on geographic growth. The company hopes to achieve further density in the markets that it already operates in, according to Hoopes.

Cardinal Health’s at-home solutions business moves front and center

While Velocare is seeing growth, Cardinal Health’s at-Home Solutions business has also branched out, as part of recent organizational resegmentation.

The company’s at-Home Solutions business was once part of its medical-surgical unit. Now, this segment is its own umbrella.

“That’s a roundabout way of saying the home is important,” Rob Schlissberg, president of Cardinal Health’s at-Home Solutions business, told HHCN. “We want to be a major player and an enabler as we are continuing to find ways to drive that care.”

One of the ways Cardinal Health has been doing is its expansion into the diabetic space. The company considers it a major business opportunity.

Ultimately, Cardinal Health is working to position itself as a key advocate for the HME industry.

“We need more strong voices for the HME industry,” Schlissberg said. “We’re trying to have a bigger voice. We serve on certain committees within AAHomecare; we have lobbying efforts down on the Hill. We want to make sure that the HME itself is being recognized for the value in which it delivers.”

Robert Holly contributed to this report.

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Recognizing that members don’t always take their medications as prescribed, the aim is to lower costs and address care gaps for over 2.3 million health plan members through the partnership.

“Adding an in-home channel to our engagement model enhances the patient experience, and also boosts our ability to meet those health plans’ CMR goals,” Fran Gregory, vice president at Cardinal Health Outcomes, told Home Health Care News. “It’s a truly patient-centric, multi-channel approach that is unmatched in the industry.”

The Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal Health is a distributor of pharmaceuticals and a manufacturer and distributor of medical and laboratory products. The company also provides performance and data solutions for health care facilities.

Over the last couple of years, the company has become far more involved with home-based care.

The company contracts with health plans, and helps to provide medication therapy management services for that health plan.

Many Medicare Advantage (MA) members qualify for medication management services, as such plans are required to have that capability. One of the most important components of those services is a comprehensive medication review.

Signify Chief Medical Officer Dr. Marc Rothman points out that unlike many of the clinicians and practitioners who are doing comprehensive medication review for MA members, his organization is working in the home.

“What we’re doing is that comprehensive medication review in the home with the member, and then using the outcomes platform to transmit that information back to the plans, clean up the medication lists and help the members to communicate with their PCPs about anything that was discussed,” he told HHCN.

Dallas-based Signify is a value-based, tech-enabled care provider that leverages at-home health risk assessments.

Signify’s in-home evaluation capabilities, and overall alignment with Cardinal Health, made them an attractive partner.

“They were really a natural match for us because they are delivering, primarily, services to Medicare members, and we’re doing the same, so why not combine these services into a patient-friendly, one-time service, where we can do two clinical evaluations in one visit?” Gregory said.

In addition to in-home capabilities, the partnership with Signify allows Cardinal Health to deliver comprehensive medication reviews that are Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) compliant.

Similarly, Rothman believes that the partnership is a “natural marriage.”

“Cardinal Health, and Outcomes – its platform – is a leader in MTM services,” he said. “They’re a leader in logistics for older adults. This helped us build our program to a very high standard, and we have a lot of Medicare Advantage clients in common.”

Ultimately, improving medication access, safety and adherence will improve clinical outcomes, including avoiding unnecessary hospitalizations.

“[Medication access, safety and adherence] have been shown to be linked with meaningful clinical outcomes in older adults with chronic diseases, like hypertension, high-cholesterol, chronic renal insufficiency and congestive heart failure,” Rothman said.

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Velocare is the culmination of the work that has gone into defining what Cardinal Health is going to offer the hospital-at-home market, Alex Hoopes, director of health care innovation at Cardinal Health and Velocare lead, told Home Health Care News.

“Simply, [Velocare] is a combination of a technology platform, along with a new type of distribution model that sits behind that platform to bring a wide breadth of critical goods and services to patients in their home on one to two hours notice,” he said.

The Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal Health is a distributor of pharmaceuticals and a manufacturer and distributor of medical and laboratory products. The company also provides performance and data solutions to health care facilities.

Currently, Cardinal Health serves roughly 90% of U.S. hospitals, more than 60,000 U.S. pharmacies and 10,000 specialty physician offices and clinics. It also provides more than 3.4 million patients with over 46,000 home health care products.

The company has invested heavily in its at-home business over recent years.

With Velocare, orders for products are placed through its platform by the provider. The products are aimed at patients receiving hospital-at-home care. These products include things like medical waste containers, medically tailored meals, medical supplies, medical devices and remote patient monitoring technology.

After the order has been placed, a care coordinator team ensures that it reaches the closest Cardinal Health depot or warehouse. The items are then delivered to the home, and once the hospital-at-home period is over, Cardinal Health collects any remaining medical supplies.

“All of the logistics of getting the goods and the services into the home 24/7 on short notice is important for that high risk, complex or serious patient,” Rami Karjian, CEO of Medically Home, told HHCN.

The collaboration between Cardinal Health and Medically Home makes sense, as the two companies have a history. Medically Home counts Cardinal Health as one of its repeat investors.

“We made contact with Medically Home’s CEO in 2018 at a conference — just kind of a chance conversation between their CEO and someone on our team,” Hoopes said. “This led to our first investment in Medically Home. At the time, that investment was based on a belief that we could see the vision. It made sense to us that more care was going to move to the home.”

At the start of 2022, Cardinal Health followed up that investment as part of a cohort — which also included Baxter International Inc. and Global Medical Response — that injected $110 million into Medically Home.

For Medically Home, Cardinal Health’s Velocare will allow the growing company to further expand its services.

“It’s allowing us to scale this better and faster, which is particularly important as we’re getting more momentum and getting this to more patients in more markets,” Karjian said. “We’ve worked with Cardinal previously, where they supported us with supplies in the home. Now, we’re expanding this to allow them to do more.”

When it comes to hospital-at-home, supply chains can sometimes present a challenge for operators working in this space. Ultimately, alleviating this burden is the value-add of Velocare.

“Supply chain is a huge problem,” Hoopes said. “In hospital-at-home programs, you have a lot of vendors that you have to orchestrate. They’re each tackling a thin slice of the patient’s needs. There’s a lot of potential fail points, and a lot of coordination required. From the patient perspective, there’s just a lot of people showing up at their home continuously, which is maybe not the best thing if you’re trying to heal. Those are some of the areas that we’re trying to get after. We feel like we can make a meaningful impact.”

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On Thursday, the company announced that it was taking another step in the expansion of that business. It is opening up a new distribution warehouse in Central Ohio as it finds geographies where it can make the most impact on the country’s shift to home-based care.

The new distribution center, the company said, will exclusively benefit the at-Home solutions business.

“This is our 10th distribution center,” Rob Schlissberg, the president of Cardinal Health at-Home Solutions, told Home Health Care News. “And I think one thing that’s unique about our network, and that we think is great about our network, is that these buildings are only for at-Home Solutions.”

The Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal Health serves nearly 90% of U.S. hospitals, as well as over 60,000 U.S. pharmacies and 10,000 specialty physician offices and clinics. It also provides more than 3.4 million patients with over 46,000 home health care products.

Its at-Home Solutions business, while a major distributor of durable medical equipment directly to consumers, also works on a business-to-business basis. On its own, it services more than 3 million patients per year.

“Broadly, it’s this type of care that will happen outside of a hospital – you are seeing higher-acuity type of care happening in different settings,” Schlissberg said. “I continually tell my team, ‘How lucky are we that we’re in this industry where the consumer wants it, and it’s more comfortable to them, it is less costly for the provider, and it’s good for all stakeholders, including the hospitals?’ How many industries can say that?”

As for the details of the distribution center, it is a 208,144 square-foot building that will integrate “state-of-the-art logistics technology,” according to the company. It is placed in Central Ohio due to home-based care demand, but also due to travel logistics.

“The Ohio Valley is one of the most densely populated areas of the country and a centrally located region with access to a major interstate highway system – critical to our fast transit needs,” Steve Mason, the CEO of the Cardinal Health’s Medical Segment, said in a press release. “These investments are part of Cardinal Health’s commitment to growing our already significant and strategic distribution footprint in Central Ohio and delivering end-to-end products and solutions that advance healthcare and improve lives every day.”

The company will be opening another facility in Columbus, Ohio, later this year as well.

Broadly, the company believes it’s both helping drive the shift to home-based care and also benefiting from it at the same time.

“It’s probably both; I think it’ll certainly benefit us if more and more patients are getting care in the home, because we are a provider of care in the home,” Schlissberg said. “And we enable others to provide care in the home. We think not only the services in which we provide today, but our ability to expand in the future into other settings of care or types of care, can help enable that. We believe more will happen in the home, and we want to do all we can to help people be comfortable and healthy in the home.”

Either way, the at-Home Solutions business is a major part of one of the biggest companies in the entire country.

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This article is sponsored by Cardinal Health. In this Voices interview, Home Health Care News sits down with Alex Hoopes, Director of Healthcare Innovation at Cardinal Healthat-Home Solutions, to learn how home-based care operators can take new angles on the vital yet draining discussion around the industry’s staffing shortage. Hoopes also shares advice on how home-based care providers can use technology to improve patient-caregiver relationships, and a look ahead at what Cardinal Health is doing in that space and others.

Home Health Care News: What experiences do you most draw from in your role today?

Alex Hoopes: As a health care innovator, my job is to bring novel solutions to big problems. When I think of the experiences that have helped me to be a good problem-solver, two come to mind. First is my formal background and education as a pharmacist. Pharmacists do a lot of probing and unpacking of problems, making sure that we’re solving the right problem for our patients. If a patient comes in complaining of a symptom, we have to do detective work to see if it’s a symptom on its own, if it’s related to a drug or if it’s related to their conditions. Our training as scientists helps us make data-based decisions, generate hypotheses and test those hypotheses, allowing us to excel in an innovation role.

The second experience that I draw from is being a patient. About two years ago, I had to become a patient within the health care system for the first time. One of the guiding principles of innovation and new product development is this concept of NIHITO, an acronym that stands for Nothing Important Happens Inside The Office. It’s our mantra: we have to get out and actually see firsthand the problems that our customers are experiencing. The experience I got, actually being a patient for the first time, helped shape the way that I view the health care system. That’s what I lean on.

We all know about the industry’s staffing crisis, and talking about it can at times feel like spinning our wheels. What are the other angles that home-based care operators can take when examining this crisis?

Hoopes: I think the staffing crisis, in really simple terms, boils down to this: There is too much work to do, too many patients to manage and not enough providers, nurses and aides to do that work. A lot of the conversation around the staffing crisis, and home health in particular, has been around, How do you get more nurses in the front door? How do you get more students in school to think about going into home health? How do you convince nurses to do a career switch? Lastly, how do you retain the staff that you have?

That’s a worthwhile focus, and we should absolutely be thinking through how we increase the supply of nurses. But the other angle that we’ve been spending more time on is, if we start from the workforce that we have today, how do we make that workforce more efficient?

That’s a big focus for us, especially when we think about how the Cardinal Health offerings for home health agencies can intersect with this crisis. We are evaluating the way nurses work with our programs to learn how we can drive efficiencies in those programs. But then, zooming out a little bit, we look at all the things that we ask a home health nurse to do. There’s a lot of opportunity out there to take less valuable work off of their plates so that we can get more out of the staff that we have.

I think it’s going to be a long road until we find out what the other side of this crisis looks like but I think that taking a multi-lens approach to this problem is the only way that we’re going to get through it.

If I were betting, I would say the long-term health and sustainability of our workforce, and our ability to meet the demand, will come down to maximizing the staff that we already have, as opposed to trying to get more clinicians in the front door.

What barriers, or opportunities, are most affecting how home-based care providers use new technologies to drive staffing efficiencies?

Hoopes: When we talk to our home health customers, we hear a lot about how they’re leveraging technologies, especially in process automation. This gives nurses more time to do the things that technology is not that good at, which is working directly with patients and trying to execute that plan of care.

Something I think about is the way care is paid for in a home health episode, and how payment is often still tied to doing a certain number of prescribed or defined activities. The room to innovate within those constraints is pretty narrow. As we see more innovative payment models and the federal government continues to push more value-based payment arrangements, we will see the removal of key structural barriers that can unlock the potential for tremendous innovations that create new and better ways to care for patients.

If we can get to that point, the innovation possibilities become much more expansive. How do we get to that point? Well, there is a lot of innovative work happening in the private payer space, the commercial space, even on the Medicare Advantage side, to show payers how different payment models can lead to improved outcomes. In the near term, I think agencies need to focus on engaging in more innovative reimbursement conversations with payers. The time is right for them to be proactive.

What is Cardinal Health doing in 2022 to help providers retain staff?

Hoopes: I think each interaction between a home health nurse and one of their agencies, vendors or partners can have a net-positive or a net-negative impact on that nurse’s day, and contribute to their overall job satisfaction. We take that idea to heart: that even though a nurse may spend a relatively small amount of time directly interacting with us, we need to make sure we’re providing as seamless, efficient and positive an interaction as we possibly can.

It’s one thing if we can provide a good value proposition to the agency when we’re partnering with our home health customers, but the nurses are the ones who are interacting with our programs on a day-to-day basis. If we create friction in that experience, it doesn’t really matter what our value proposition to an agency is.

To that end, we evaluate every aspect of the journey that our nurses take when they’re interacting with us to identify ways that we can have more net-positive impacts on our nurses and the work that they do. Our goal is to be a supplies distributor of choice for nurses, meaning that we’re providing an experience that makes it easy to do business with us because we maximize their efficiency.

We offer mobile app ordering for our nurses so that they can place orders for supplies seamlessly on a mobile device. We do a lot in terms of EMR integration. Within the systems they’re already using, we provide nurses one less place that they need to go to get the supplies they need for their patients.

We’re doing a lot with on-demand medical supplies, which makes it easier for nurses to treat their patients. We get things directly to the patient’s home right when the nurse needs them so that all they need to do is focus on showing up and executing that plan of care.

How is Cardinal Health helping providers improve patient-caregiver relationships?

Hoopes: I think about this in two different buckets. One, I think of the caregiver as the clinical staff, and on that front, we’re equipping the clinical staff with tools that make it easier to integrate medical supplies into the care plan, improving patient outcomes and overall patient health.

The analogy that I draw to explain executing a care plan is following a cooking recipe. You look up the recipe, get your list of ingredients, go to the store, buy all those ingredients, bring them home and then put them to work. Think of how easy it would be if, instead, you could just say, “I want to make this dish,” and everything that you need just showed up instantly.

That’s the way we’re thinking about seamlessly integrating medical supplies into a plan of care. If the nurse knows what plan they want to execute, everything they need should just come to them. All they have to worry about is executing the plan of care.

The other way that we think about the patient-caregiver relationship is with non-clinical individuals. Oftentimes the caregiver in these patients’ lives is a family member. That is a heavy burden falling on these family caregivers to navigate different transitions of care.

When a patient is in a home health episode of care, a lot’s being taken care of for them. Once that home health episode ends, the patient has to transition back into their normal life. One of the things that we’re doing is focusing on that continuity of care and how we can help the patient’s caregivers transition them back to a state of health, providing them the medical supplies they need for a seamless transition. We put a lot of emphasis on creating a smooth transition to a post-home health state of health. We want to be there for the patient throughout all their levels of care.

Finish this sentence: “The home-based care industry in 2022 will be the year of…”?

Hoopes: It’s going to be the year of reconciliation. After the last two years of the pandemic, agencies were forced to experiment in many different ways. As we hopefully start transitioning into a post-pandemic world, it’s a time of reconciliation, and we need to take stock of all the things that we tried over the last few years and adopt a few tactics, a few technologies, a few new processes that provide the biggest benefit in the post-pandemic era.

Not everything is going to stick. That’s the nature of experimenting. Now it’s time to find those things that we think will stick and ingrain them into patient care going forward.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Care is everywhere, and so is Cardinal Health. Our health care solutions across the continuum of care help providers work more efficiently, patients live healthier and health care systems work smarter. To learn more about how Cardinal Health at-Home can help your agency, visit CardinalHealth.com.

The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact sales@agingmedia.com.

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That company is Cardinal Health Inc. (NYSE: CAH), which has let Cardinal Health at-Home Solutions pave its own way in a budding home-based care market. The company – which posted over $160 billion in revenue last year – has identified its at-home business as a “growth business.”

“There’s a lot of smaller businesses nested within Cardinal, and some are considered growth businesses, and that includes at-home solutions,” Dr. Philip Parks, the VP of health care innovation for Cardinal Health at-Home Solutions, told Home Health Care News. “These are segments that are primarily in areas of health care that are growing, rather than plateauing or shrinking.”

Parks onboarded at Cardinal Health in 2020, tasked with putting together a new team to lead the at-home business unit on a new growth trajectory. Last year, that team was put in place.

He is also a board observer for the hospital-at-home enabler Medically Home and a visiting scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Prior to Cardinal Health, Parks worked at the Boston-based Exact Sciences, where he was the senior director of health care transformation.

The Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal Health serves nearly 90% of U.S. hospitals, as well as over 60,000 U.S. pharmacies and 10,000 specialty physician offices and clinics. It also provides more than 3.4 million patients with over 46,000 home health care products.

Outside of the durable medical equipment (DME) business, its digital ecosystem, which is designed to support medication adherence, has reached more than 23 million patients. It has likewise worked with over 60 payers.

On its own, Cardinal Health at-Home Solutions services more than 3 million patients per year, both on a direct-to-consumer basis and on a business-to-business basis, with hospitals and home-based care agencies.

“Even over the last 15 to 20 years – but more rapidly over the last couple – there’s been increasing efforts around bringing more care in the home,” Parks said. “So that’s really the foundation strategically for the at-home solutions business, which is not just about home care, home health or hospice, but the strategic belief that more care in the home, across the continuum, is really the megatrend that we believe strongly in.”

Parks added that it’s not an “either-or” trend, but instead an “and” one. For instance, hospitals will be honed in on in-patient acute care while making sure patients can get back to their homes as soon as possible, or stay there for as long as possible.

At the same time, home-based care agencies will benefit from that complementary trend, he said.

“We strongly believe that the home continues to be validated from a patient perspective, from a provider perspective and even from a health system and payer perspective,” Parks said. “It’s a destination where many levels of care can be accomplished, whether they be in person or enhanced with virtual- and technology-enabled care.”

The ‘shift’ to home

Cardinal Health believes there’s no going back, that the megatrend that is care moving to the home is the “new normal.”

But that megatrend isn’t going to come to fruition on its own.

“It’s going to continue to incrementally advance,” Parks said. “With innovation, strategy and reimbursement models that support more care in the home.”

Without that innovation, broad and bold predictions – such as the suggestion that $265 billion worth of care services could shift to the home by 2025 – are more “provocative statements than predictions,” Parks said.

In order to succeed in that new normal, Cardinal Health at-Home Solutions is positioning itself as more than a provider of DME – as a company that harnesses the tide and lifts all those home-based care provider boats with it.

“Our team is heavily focused on thinking about a strategic view of what needs to be done to make this happen,” Parks said. “And that’s focused on the end user, the end customer experience and what is not being met today by what we do or what others do.”

That thought process was reflected in a recent HHCN conversation with Nick Loporcaro, the former CEO of Landmark Health and the newest partner of The Vistria Group.

“Helping the industry get better organized and elevating it, … that is an area that interests me,” Loporcaro said. “I think there’s an opportunity there in being able to do that without necessarily consolidating the whole space.”

For instance, Parks mentioned that the home care, home health and hospice industries are still plagued by “legacy systems,” where there are artificial walls between providers, distributors, payers and health systems that manifest on a daily basis.

That, in turn, leads to patients not getting what they need, when they need it, in the home.

“One of the key things that we initiated immediately upon coming in was a rapid commercialization of utilizing external and internal platforms to diminish that friction and improve the experience,” Parks said. “That rapidly accelerated commercialization effort, it’s yielding fruit now from a customer experience perspective, but also improves our ability to be more efficient as a company.”

An example Parks gave was faxes. Something as simple as faxes, which are still widely used in the health care space, can lead to pitfalls that eventually affect patients in the home.

Cardinal Health at-Home Solutions has made an effort to get providers and other partners to do away with faxes, and instead have structured data fields coming from electronic health records, which then are put into a system that can rapidly asses what is incomplete so patients can get what they need from providers as soon as possible.

“That’s a really important piece that may sound basic, but can be transformative for large companies that are chasing documents and chasing faxes,” Parks said.

What’s next for Cardinal

Cardinal wants its hands on as many parts of the at-home care ecosystem as possible. If it’s able to accomplish that, its belief is that that will lead to a better patient experience in the home.

It’s piloting a few models – most of which Parks couldn’t get into – around bringing all of the parts that make up the home-based care experience closer together.

“That way, there’s a more holistic experience of getting patients what they need from a single entity,” he said.

The at-home unit works with home health and hospice agencies on distribution already, but wants to become an even more important partner to them on a business-to-business level.

Additionally, as one of the early investors into Medically Home, the business unit is naturally honed in on what’s going on in hospital at home.

“That’s an area we’re extremely invested in,” Parks said. “And now, we’re moving out with plans on supporting hospital care in the home through enabling a scaled supply chain.”

The post Cardinal Health Investing Heavily in Its At-Home Care Business appeared first on Home Health Care News.

The Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente made a $100 million investment into Medically Home in May of 2021. Before that, the company had raised $64 million.

The most recent investment was led by Baxter International Inc., Global Medical Response and Cardinal Health, with the Mayo Clinic and Kaiser again contributing.

“The big picture is that everybody has been very focused on decentralizing care into the home,” Medically Home CEO Rami Karjian told Home Health Care News. “What started initially as in-patient hospitalization at home has now been broadening. What this announcement really represents is us going to the next level and being able to scale.”

In other words, the hospital-at-home enabler Medically Home wants to be more than that. At this point, while hospital at home is clearly still a focus, the company wants to be a leader in bringing more advanced care into the home in general.

Based in Boston, Medically Home provides health systems with the tools to care for patients by navigating reimbursement models, implementing technology and providing the clinical services needed. More than 7,000 patients nationwide have been cared for under its model.

Its new investment partners come from a wider variety of backgrounds.

For instance, Baxter International has a portfolio of diagnostic, critical and kidney care solutions, along with a suite of hospital and surgical products used in patient homes, hospitals and physician offices. Global Medical Response (GMR) is a provider of medical care, primarily in the areas of emergency and patient relocation services. Cardinal Health, meanwhile, is a distributor of pharmaceuticals, medical products and digital health solutions.

All three companies have worked in at-home care previously. Cardinal Health, in fact, already has an at-home care solutions arm.

“Mayo and Kaiser represent the health systems and integrated systems that want to do more decentralizing care into the home,” Karjian said. “GMR represents 30,000 paramedics that have an integral role to play in getting care into the home. Particularly given the nursing shortages that we’ve seen, that represents net new capacity for care that wasn’t previously available. Baxter and Cardinal represent the goods side of what it takes to get care moving from institutional facilities – like hospitals and SNFs – into the home.”

The new investment capital, which Medically Home feels will help it significantly expand its network and capabilities, comes at a time when many hospitals across the U.S. are reaching capacity.

The Omicron variant of COVID-19, although milder than previous strains, has been transmissible enough that it is causing familiar stress on in-patient hospitals.

Currently, the majority of states are reporting hospital capacity over 70%, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Close to 78% of in-patient hospital beds are in use. Over 18% of those are occupied due to COVID-19.

Karjian believes the investment will help Medically Home get to more health systems faster, help it expand into rural areas and also potentially expand its reach outside of the U.S.

“This investment is going to allow us to bring more technology and more products to [our partners] and enable them to help the patients they care for,” he said. “It’s also going to help us as we think about expanding beyond the U.S., and even within the U.S. We’re very excited about rural health, … and we think it is a really big deal in terms of where health care needs to start to address more of the health equity and disparity challenges we have.”

All five companies involved in the investment reiterated in statements the importance of further bringing care in the home.

“Enabling health equity and decentralized care for patients to receive hospital level care is no longer health care of the future – it’s here today,” Suzanne Foster, the president of Cardinal Health at-Home Solutions, said in a statement. “Cardinal Health is devoted to working closely with Medically Home and its partners to collectively provide optimal, in-home patient experiences and outcomes.”

Medically Home, Mayo Clinic and Kaiser are all founding members of the Moving Health Home (MHH) coalition. The group’s focus is to advocate for favorable legislation for home-based care in Washington, D.C.

As Medically Home attempts to expand its reach and influence, Karjian also said that he is confident in forthcoming legislation put forward by MHH that would help enable home-based care players across the spectrum.

The post Medically Home Looks to Expand Business Model After Landing $110M Strategic Investment appeared first on Home Health Care News.

The San Fernando, California-based nonprofit community organization Partners in Care Foundation has partnered with 24Hr HomeCare to create Partners24. The arrangement is a private label partnership that offers in-home care services such as assistance with daily living activities, according to a press release.

Patients of Partners24 will be able to receive care 24/7 by caregivers who are tailored to fit their individual needs.

Both companies, which have worked together in the past, have immense experience in transitional and long-term care.

Cardinal Health Expands in Home Health Care

Cardinal Health, a pharmaceutical and medical product distributor based in Dublin, Ohio, has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase Medtronic for $6.1 billion in cash, HME News reports.

Dublin, Ireland-based Medtronic’s business revolves around patient care, deep vein thrombosis, nutritional inefficiency as well as in-home care. There are 23 product categories across multiple markets throughout the world, but more than 70% of Medtronic’s total sales were in the U.S. at the end of October 2016.

“Given the current trends in health care, including aging demographics and a focus on post-acute care, this industry-leading portfolio will help us further expand our scope in the operating room, in long-term care facilities and in home health care, reaching customers across the entire continuum of care,” George Barrett, chairman and CEO of Cardinal Health, said in a press release.

Once the transaction is complete, Medtronic will become part of Cardinal Health’s medical segment led by CEO Don Casey.

The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of the company’s fiscal year 2018.

Simione Healthcare Consultants Acquires Recruiting Firm

Two consulting firms that serve home care and hospice organizations— Simione Healthcare Consultants and Exact Recruiting—have become one. Simione Healthcare Consultants acquired Florida-based Exact Recruiting Solutions, according to a press release.

As part of the acquisition deal, Exact Recruiting Solutions will keep its brand as well as its president and founder, Eric Scharber. Scharber will serve as a principal at Simione and his team will also stay with the new company.

This acquisition marks the fourth location for Connecticut-based Simione Healthcare Consultants. In addition to the Florida location, the company also has offices in Massachusetts and California.

InSync Healthcare Solutions Partners with Homecare Software Company

InSync Healthcare Solutions, a provider of cloud-based health care solutions, has partnered with Virginia-based Caretime, which provides home health care software for consumer-directed in-home services and private pay, according to a press release.

With the partnership, home health care agencies will be able to submit claims quickly and maintain accuracy through Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) capabilities in InSync’s electronic medical record and practice software.

BrightStar Care Receives Home Care Award

BrightStar Care of Wilmington and Brunswick County in North Carolina recently received a 2017 Best of Home Care Leader in Excellence Award by Home Care Pulse, according to Wilmington Biz.

Other BrightStar locations also received the award, as well as various in-home care agencies throughout the country.

See the full list of agencies that received the Best of Home Care – Leader in Excellence award.

Written by Alana Stramowski

The post Business Briefs: 24Hr HomeCare Enters Into New Partnership appeared first on Home Health Care News.