Clinical laboratories with mobile phlebotomy programs are positioned to benefit as demand for at-home blood draws increases
Hospital-at-Home (HaH) models of remote healthcare continue to pick up speed. The latest example comes from the 793-bed Mass General Brigham (MGB) health system which partnered with Best Buy Health to build the largest HaH program in the nation, according to Becker’s Hospital Review. This means clinical laboratories will have new opportunities to provide mobile phlebotomy home-draw services for MGB’s HaH patients.
“The health system now has a capacity for acute hospital care at home of 70 patients and is currently treating about 50 to 60 a day. The goal is to move to 10% of Mass General Brigham’s overall capacity, or about 200 to 300 patients,” Becker’s reported.
Best Buy Health provides MGB’s Home Hospital patients with computer tablets and Internet access, Becker’s noted.
“Healthcare is fragmented, the technology doesn’t always connect. Technology is our expertise,” said Chemu Lang’at, COO, Best Buy Health, during the WMIF presentation.
The hospital is the most expensive site of care in the US healthcare industry. Thus, preventing patients from needing to be hospitalized—or treating them in their homes—could reduce the cost of care considerably for both patients and multihospital systems.
“It’s been estimated that 30% of inpatient care will move to the home in the next five years, representing $82 billion in revenue. This is a tremendous opportunity,” said Heather O’Sullivan, MS, RN, A-GNP, Mass General Brigham’s President of Healthcare at Home, during MGB’s presentation at the World Medical Innovation Forum in September, according to Becker’s Hospital Review. MGB’s HaH program offers clinical laboratories with new opportunities to provide mobile phlebotomy services to the health system’s Hospital-at-Home patients. (Photo copyright: Mass General Brigham.)
Hospital-at-Home
Proponents of HaH call it a “sustainable, innovative, and next-generation healthcare model. [It is] person-centered medical care that keeps patients out of the hospital, away from possible complications, and on to better outcomes,” RamaOnHealthcare reported.
Some of the biggest payoffs of HaH include:
• Cost Savings: Anne Klibanski, MD, President and CEO, MGB, described the HaH program as “a way the health system could stay afloat and thrive amid financial challenges affecting the industry, with lower costs and better outcomes for patients at home,” Becker’s Hospital Review reported.
• Increased Capacity: Having an HaH program can help alleviate bed shortages by treating many conditions in patient’s homes rather than in the ER. “The program … typically treats patients with conditions like COPD flare-ups, heart failure exacerbations, acute infections and complex cellulitis,” Becker’s reported.
“It’s not typically comfortable to be cared for in the emergency room,” said O’Neil Britton, MD, MGB’s Chief Integration Officer, at WMIF.
• Decreased Staff Exhaustion: “Clinicians have described getting an extra level of joy from treating patients at home,” said Jatin Dave, MD, CMO, MassHealth, at WMIF. He added that this could provide one solution to healthcare burnout, Becker’s noted.
• Lab Connection: Clinical laboratories have the opportunity to meet the need for mobile phlebotomists to draw blood specimens from HaH patients in their homes.
• Patient Satisfaction: “The data suggests that for populations studied in multiple areas, [HaH] is a safe service with high-quality care, low readmission rates, low escalation rates, low infection rates and—bottom line—patients love it.” Adam Groff, MD, co-founder of Maribel Health, told RamaOnHealthcare.
HaH Program Going Forward
Britton told the WMIF audience that MGB hopes to “expand the program for surgery, oncology, and pain management patients, recently admitting its first colorectal surgery patient,” Becker’s reported.
However, the future of MGB’s HaH program is not assured. “The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) waiver to provide acute hospital care at home expires at the end of 2024. A bill to extend the program recently passed a House committee,” Becker’s reported.
Dave said at WMIF that he “hopes the home will one day provide a ‘single infrastructure’ for all levels of care: from primary to inpatient care to skilled nursing,” Becker’s Hospital Review noted, adding, “The home is where, in the long run, we can have this full continuum.”
Overall, this can be a snapshot of where the HaH movement in the US is currently at, with the Mass General Brigham example showing that this mode of healthcare is delivering results and helping patients. Clinical laboratories across the nation should track efforts by hospitals and health systems in their areas to establish and expand hospital-at-home programs.
Hospital-at-home programs like that of Atrium Health are a trend that may create new opportunities for local clinical laboratories to support physicians treating patients in the comfort of their own homes
Here is a deal that shows the hospital-at-home (HaH) movement is gaining momentum, a trend that clinical laboratories need to recognize for the opportunities it represents. Best Buy Health is partnering with 40-hospital Atrium Health in an HaH program that the healthcare system plans to scale nationally.
This newly-announced collaboration means that Charlotte, North Carolina-based Atrium Health—as partner—may include the hospitals and providers that are part of the 26-hospital Advocate Aurora Health system (now known as Advocate Health), a non-profit healthcare system that Atrium merged with in December of 2022. Providers and hospitals from North/South Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio all could be participating in the new HaH venture.
This latest partnership between a retail giant and healthcare network demonstrates how innovation is working its way into the US healthcare system via companies not traditionally involved in direct patient care. These two organizations see an opportunity to combine their strengths to “enhance the patient experience of receiving hospital-level care at home,” according to a Best Buy news release.
“This is the coming together of technology and empathy,” said Rasu Shrestha, MD (above), Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation and Commercialization Officer at Advocate Health, in a press release. “We’re able to leverage the power of social workers, paramedics, nurses and physicians, but also technology to take care of the patients in their homes. We can bring forward things like remote patient monitoring and sophisticated wearable devices that capture their vital signs and combine it with the human touch—bringing it directly into our patients’ homes.” Clinical laboratories that support providers in the states Advocate Health serves may want to contact Best Buy Health. (Photo copyright: Advocate Health.)
Dispatching Geek Squads to Support Telehealth in Patients’ Homes
Best Buy Health brings to its collaboration with Atrium Health expertise in omnichannel business strategies, supply chain, and a platform to enable telehealth connectivity between patients and providers, as well as deploying specially trained Geek Squad agents for in-home support, according to an Atrium Health press release.
“With Atrium Health, we want to help enable healthcare at home for everyone. It’s getting the devices to the home when Atrium Health and the patient needs them,” said Deborah Di Sanzo, President of Best Buy Health.
Atrium Health sees Best Buy Health as a partner that can grow its program while addressing complex in-home technology that can be “tricky” to operate, Retail Dive reported.
“This transition that happens from discharging a patient from a hospital to the void of their home is the dark side of the moon: it’s disconnected, confusing, expensive. What we’ve been doing in the past is working through our hospital-at-home program and putting together a lot of these devices,” Rasu Shrestha, MD, Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation and Commercialization Officer at Advocate Health, told Fierce Healthcare.
“By working with Best Buy Health, we’re developing the seamless connected care experience and an opportunity to truly scale this,” he added.
Supporting hospital-at-home services in collaboration with Atrium Health will be a new role for at least some members of the Geek Squad. “They won’t necessarily be the same team that’s doing your home theater. They will be Geek Squad agents specially trained in health to deliver specific services in the home,” said Deborah Di Sanzo, President of Best Buy Health. (Photo copyright: Best Buy.)
Best Buy’s Healthcare Acquisitions and Growth in Hospital-at-Home Programs
Current Health, a remote monitoring care-at-home platform, in 2021.
While Best Buy was busy acquiring healthcare companies, more HaH programs popped up across the US due in part to rising inpatient costs and providers’ need to be more efficient and resourceful.
Atrium Health started its Hospital-at-Home program in March 2020 as a way to care for COVID-19 patients. The HaH program now serves people with:
According to Healthcare Dive, Shrestha claimed Atrium’s HaH program “has served more than 6,300 patients and freed 25,000 hospital bed days since it launched in March 2020,” and produced clinical outcomes that were “the same or better” when compared to the health systems’ own hospitals, and with higher patient satisfaction scores.
“We anticipate the partnership will combine Atrium Health operational and clinical expertise with Best Buy Health’s technical and logistical expertise to allow us to scale the program to 100 patients at a time and beyond within our market,” Shrestha told Healthcare Dive. “When you put that into context, this would be the equivalent of having an additional mid-sized hospital and have a real impact on capacity in our bricks-and-mortar facilities.”
Taking Atrium’s HaH Program Nationwide
According to federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services predictions, healthcare spending will reach $6.8 trillion by 2030. This might explain why Best Buy increased its investment in healthcare at the same time its sales declined 9.3% in the fourth quarter of 2022 amid softening consumer demand for electronics, Reuters reported.
And, according to Forbes, though financial terms on the Best Buy/Atrium Health partnership were not released, additional investments are planned to “scale [Atrium’s HaH program] beyond the system.”
“We combine our omnichannel, Geek Squad, caring centers, and Current Health services to enable care,” Di Sanzo told Forbes. “At scale, no other company has the holistic combination of resources that when combined, will change the lives of consumers and enable them to heal right in their own home surrounding by the people and things they love the most. Those strengths, combined with Atrium Health’s extensive clinical expertise and deep experience leading in virtual care, will help us improve and enable care in the home for everyone.”
Clinical Laboratory Testing at Home
Clearly there are opportunities for clinical laboratories to support providers who treat patients in their homes. Lab leaders may want to reach out to colleagues who are planning HaH programs in partnership with Best Buy Health, Atrium Health, or other companies around the nation launching similar hospital-at-home programs.
As medical laboratories address staffing challenges, HaH strategies for performing blood tests and other diagnostics on patients in their homes could lead to important new revenue.
Studies show home-based hospital acute care results in fewer medical laboratory and diagnostic tests
Home-based hospital care (HBHC) is a care delivery model that is evolving at a rapid pace. To be effective, HBHC must improve patient outcomes while avoiding the expenses associated with an inpatient stay at a hospital.
However, significant growth in the number of patients treated in home-based hospital care programs would directly affect hospital-based clinical laboratories and pathology groups. Among other things, this would reduce the volume of inpatient testing while increasing the number of outpatient/outreach specimens.
Evidence is accumulating in favor of HBHC. New research shows that a New Mexico home-based hospital care (HH) program demonstrated cost savings and equal or better patient outcomes and patient satisfaction for acutely-ill patients compared to similar patients receiving in-hospital care. These new findings affirm similar results from a 2005 study of HBHC. (more…)
