When Medically Home announced that it had received another round of funding in January, the $110 million in the form of a strategic investment was led by a diverse group of companies.
Kaiser Permanente and the Mayo Clinic were again partakers after they had already made significant investments into Medically Home in the past. But the newcomers in the strategic investment piqued interest.
One of those investors – Global Medical Response (GMR) – has become a partner now that has changed the way Medically Home staffs its cases in the home. And the blueprint could be one of the longer-term solutions to curb the home-based care staffing crisis.
“I think there is light [at the end of the tunnel],” GMR Chief Medical Officer Ed Racht said during Home Health Care News’ virtual Staffing Summit last week. “[The situation] has forced us to look at some some things that we probably would have never looked at in in the past. And really helped us to look at what’s best for the patient, what’s most effective and efficient for the health care system, and what’s safe in that environment using health care providers from a variety of different disciplines.”
Global Medical Response has about 35,600 employees and delivers care across 4,000 communities in the U.S. Its emergency medical services (EMS) workers provide care to millions of patients per year.
Teaming up with GMR allows Medically Home to tap into talent pools that “don’t exist in the brick and mortar,” Rami Karjian, the CEO and co-founder of Medically Home, also said at the Staffing Summit.
“As we deploy care into the home, we need to provide that reliability, that safety, that interaction with the patient that is at the same level or greater than what you’d expect in a brick-and-mortar hospital,” Karjian said. “That has led Medically Home to look for partners across the country that are at scale, patient centric in their approach and able to bring capabilities that don’t exist today.”
Based in Boston, Medically Home is best known as a hospital-at-home enabler. But through the GMR partnership and others, it has made it clear it has more aspirations than that. Broadly, Karjian characterizes the larger goal as “the decentralization of care.” It provides health system partners with the tools – both reimbursement wise and clinically – to deliver care in the home.
On the other end, GMR’s abilities offer more tools for Medically Home and its model.
“It’s over 30,000 paramedics across the country, with vehicles. And I’m not talking ambulances, but SUVs that are equipped with tests and treatments that are not available in a standard home health environment – like ultrasounds, like EKGs,” Karjian said. “So they bring two things. One is new labor pools, like paramedics, but also nurses. The second is new tests and treatments into the home, 24/7, at scale, reliably, to support decentralizing care from the hospital to the home.”
That, in turn, helps Medically Home’s health system partners care for more and more patients outside of traditional, brick-and-mortar settings. The company can then scale its hospital-at-home programs, which will likely continue to grow in prevalence, whether the Acute Hospital at Home waiver is discontinued or not.
More importantly, from a staffing perspective, this new labor pool is enjoying the work.
“[In this setting], there’s better outcomes, higher patient satisfaction, but also higher workforce satisfaction,” Karjian said.
So while Medically Home is benefitting from a new labor pool – a labor pool that other home-based care providers could too take advantage of – GMR is also providing care to a new group of patients.
And instead of transporting these patients to brick-and-mortar hospitals, they’re intervening and caring for them at an earlier stage.
“They’re comfortable going into homes and orchestrating and choreographing care in that environment,” Racht said. “From the longer-term care perspective, we didn’t have the infrastructure or a health care partner for when the patients would say they didn’t want to go to the hospital. So in our world, they would get a refusal, and then a big chunk of those patients would end up reactivating the 911 system and get transported to the emergency department. It was a very clunky, although necessary, option to get them properly evaluated.”
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