Temporary regulatory flexibilities implemented during the public health emergency have given health care organizations a chance to test new care delivery methods, including hospital-at-home programs and models that bring the skilled nursing facility (SNF) into the home setting.
While COVID-19 flexibilities may eventually go away, the home-focused initiatives they led to are destined to stick around. That’s certainly true in the case of UnityPoint at Home, which announced a new SNF-at-home partnership with WellSky on Wednesday.
“We know that more and more patients want to recover at home,” Mag VanOosten, president and chief clinical officer of UnityPoint at Home, said in a press release. “With SNF-at-home, patient-focused coordination among providers is vitally important and can be among the most challenging aspects of the care-at-home model.”
West Des Moines, Iowa-based UnityPoint at Home is a subsidiary of UnityPoint Health, a health system with hundreds of affiliated locations across Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin.
Meanwhile, Overland Park, Kansas-based WellSky is a technology company that uses its software, analytics and other services to help health care providers across the continuum achieve better outcomes and lower costs.
UnityPoint Health began developing its SNF-at-home program in the middle of 2019, before the start of the COVID-19 emergency. In July 2020, VanOosten told Home Health Care News that the program would fall under the system’s Care at Home department, which includes all of the work UnityPoint does for its accountable care organization (ACO) and at-risk contracts.
“Our goal is definitely to provide the right level of care in the right setting,” VanOosten said at the time. “We really believe home is where people are meant to recover.”
One of the early challenges with building a SNF-at-home model was finding sufficient caregiver support. Typically, such concepts require a mix of in-home clinical services and non-medical home care support for things like activities of daily living (ADLs) to be successful.
That’s where WellSky will now play a role.
Through the partnership, UnityPoint at Home will have access to WellSky’s care coordination platform and network of more than 4,000 personal care agencies to help deliver that non-medical caregiving support.
The SNF-at-home program will initially be introduced to UnityPoint’s patients covered by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) ACO models, with plans to support other payers and populations in the future, according to the press release.
“UnityPoint has consistently been on the forefront of emerging care models, being quick to innovate and meet patients where they prefer to receive care, which is in the home,” WellSky CEO Bill Miller said. “By enabling the precise coordination needed by complex care models such as UnityPoint’s SNF-at-home and providing access to the largest network of in-home care providers, WellSky can help UnityPoint further expand its already impressive impact.”
The idea for UnityPoint’s SNF-at-home concept came from its highly successful hospital-at-home program, which boasts incredibly low hospitalization rates and other strong metrics.
Since initiating its hospital-at-home 30-day bundle, UnityPoint has decreased its 30-day ED visit escalation from 27% to 6% while averting $904,000 in costs. The program also has patient-satisfaction scores over 99%.
Companies featured in this article:
