As we enter 2022, the home must play an increasingly prominent role in home healthcare delivery transformation. The new year brings to us the opportunity to find innovative ways to keep patients healthy at home and, in the process, advance value-based care models that focus on collaboration, whole patient and caregiver support, and outcomes overactivity.

The Home is the Future of Care Delivery

Let’s face it. When you are sick, there is nothing better than your own bed or living room. Most do not look forward to a night in a hospital bed or a wait in a doctor’s office, and as we are increasingly proving, such visits are often unnecessary. Today, more and more of the care traditionally provided in a doctor’s office, skilled nursing facility, or even a hospital stay can now safely happen in the convenience of your home. Home diagnostics or x-ray? No problem. A visit from a nurse, physician’s assistant, social worker, or palliative care specialist is now only a phone call away. The home is more comfortable, more familiar, and whether we realize it or not, it is often more cost-effective as well. And when you need food delivery or transportation to a doctor, it’s only an app away.

CareCentrix has always believed in empowering health at home. Now, in part because of COVID-19’s influence on home healthcare delivery and regulators — and a bit out of necessity — traditional barriers to home-centered care are breaking down. Care nobody would have dreamed of providing at home is safely happening. The time has come to truly put the home at the center of healthcare. When done right, it is foundational to patient-centered, collaborative, and lower-cost care models.

As we move to value-based care, it is important to empower and utilize home healthcare providers in creative ways. We must raise the acuity of the services provided in a home setting and allow medical professionals to practice at the top of their license. When done right, together, we can better engage individuals in self-care through multiple channels, including telehealth and remote patient monitoring, to fully leverage the power of care at home.

The Momentum will continue:  How Home Care Drives Value

Value-based care is accelerating with more collaborative and aligned outcomes-based contracting models becoming the norm. The surging emphasis on outcomes-based care requires that home healthcare providers can actually deliver and report on those outcomes. So how can you better leverage the home to help deliver on outcomes? Here are some key opportunities:

  1. Gathering and sharing relevant information in near real-time. Care delivery, consumer and caregiver engagement, and digital tools create the path to collect the information most relevant to identifying both clinical and non-clinical care gaps.
  2. Continuous, connected care models. Once gaps are identified, closed-loop logistical models can ensure that the right intervention is delivered at the right time by the right provider. This intervention may be in-person, but can also be virtual or even digitally delivered between traditional doctor visits. The right approach to engage can be customized based on patient preferences and needs. Improved patient engagement will be an end result.
  3. Moving away from traditional utilization management to collaborative models. The right information sharing, aligned contracts across high-performing providers, and a patient-centered system will lessen the need for utilization management, supporting lower costs with lower friction.

Success requires technical and analytic investments, collaborative payor-provider partnerships, and a unified belief that health–at-home care models will improve care and outcomes. When we all work together, home-based care and, in turn, value-based care, will move forward faster.

Interested in learning more about how your organization can effectively leverage the home to drive value-based care? Click here to learn how CareCentrix can help.


Additional Reading

Are you interested in learning more about the topic? Here are some resources we suggest: