Home is the next frontier in medical care

Since joining CenterWell over a year ago, I have had the honor of meeting some of our CenterWell Home Health clinicians in the field and getting brief glimpses into the amazing care that happens every day. Probably the most memorable visit took place in Louisville, Kentucky, where we were greeted by a blast of heat as we opened the door of a small apartment in a senior complex. It didn't take long to realize that the heat was coming from an oven that was turned on and left open, because our patient, an elderly woman without any local support, was feeling chilled, and the building heat was not yet turned on for the season. Our nurse empathetically examined and spoke to the patient, who was upset and scared, and then connected with the patient’s primary care provider to prescribe a needed medication. When the patient got tearful about how she would get the medicine, our nurse ensured that it would be delivered to her apartment door that evening. I was much less useful during this encounter, but I did manage to put on gloves and tidy up the apartment, taking the patient’s garbage out – it was the least I could do as my teammate was doing the important work of caring for our patient. I was struck not only by the clinician’s deep level of dedication and caring attitude, but I also came away with a renewed appreciation for what’s possible in a home care setting. Our nurse was able to help the patient navigate a complicated and confusing system, offering kind guidance and real support that perfectly suited the situation at hand, all while enabling the patient to stay out of the emergency department that night.

I believe the home is truly the next frontier in medical care. For many conditions, providing care in the home is the best way to ensure high-quality outcomes, with a better, more personalized patient experience. That’s why our Home Solutions segment, including CenterWell Home Health and onehome, is an important aspect of Humana ’s integrated health approach and can be particularly powerful when paired with other key capabilities like primary care and pharmacy services – as we’ve done in our CenterWell model.

After all, the home is the preferred site of care for many seniors.

The COVID-19 pandemic helped prove that meaningful medical care can be delivered in the home. A McKinsey report based on a survey of physicians and Medicare Advantage members estimated that $265 billion worth of care services, representing 25% of the total cost of care for Medicare beneficiaries, could shift to a home setting in a matter of years without reducing access or quality of care.

With today’s technology, we’re able to do much more in the home that ever before, such as primary care at home , mobile imaging, dialysis, infusion, SNF-at-home, and hospital-at-home. Care in the home also has many benefits. It can be safer, with fewer falls and infections than facility-based settings. Our clinicians can observe and understand a patient’s environment and better address social determinants of health. Home-based care can often be more affordable, and patients appreciate the comfort of familiar surroundings. ?

In CenterWell Home Health, we’re working hard to realize the potential of home-based care. We’re proud that more than 56% of CenterWell Home Health branches earned a 4.5- or 5-Star rating for quality of patient care (QOPC) from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. CenterWell Home Health averages a 4.29 QoPC Star Rating versus the CMS industry average of 3.25.

CenterWell Home Health has also earned recognition from the American Diabetes Association for providing outstanding self-management education and support to diabetes patients, like with our patient, Daron . CenterWell’s free Daily Difference with Diabetes program empowers patients to develop healthy behaviors in areas like monitoring health indicators and taking medications.

CenterWell Home Health has begun using an innovative AI-enabled digital wound management solution, which allows clinicians to efficiently capture vital wound details with a simple picture. It has proven instrumental in clinical decision-making, accelerating wound healing time by 35%, which equates to approximately 13 days faster healing per wound, while also improving the experience for both clinicians and patients.?One of our patients, Jim, had his wound successfully treated using this technology.

Still, there are challenges to scaling home-based care in the U.S.

While the country is growing older, there are not enough health practitioners to meet demand. That’s why we continue to invest in workforce development, partnering with more than 50 colleges and universities to give student nurses the opportunity to shadow our home health clinicians and gain experience with a professional before stepping out in their first job.?

We took this concept one step further by investing in a partnership with Emory University to create the CenterWell Home Health Lab to simulate home health visits, in the hope that it will not only provide more practical training, it might also inspire nursing students to consider a home health career. Working with mock patients, clinical students go through every step of a home health visit, from wound care or physical therapy to looking for hazards and ensuring the home has what patients need to recover.

As patients and health care providers become more accepting of and comfortable with home-based care, we’ll ultimately need to incentivize quality and accountability of care through value-based models. Home health has traditionally operated in a fee-for-service environment, and we’re early in our journey toward value-based reimbursement. But, fundamentally, we need to develop opportunities for home health agencies to pivot into a model that relies on value and results, and we’ll need to invest in the data and analytics infrastructure to really understand the needs of our patients.

This is an exciting time in the industry, and it’s gratifying to play a role in the growth and development of home-based care. I know we’re on the right path when I hear about Anne’s walk to Charleston .