Why Care Collaborations Could Shake Up the Home Health Food Chain

In the animal kingdom, there is strength in quantities, specifically between creatures that locate themselves towards the bottom of the meals chain. This idea is also legitimate in today’s hyper-aggressive well being treatment sector.

Progressively, smaller suppliers with comparatively confined assets and attain are teaming up in the kind of “collaboratives,” “alliances,” “networks” or “partnerships.” Nowhere is this trend more widespread than in hospice, the place at the very least a dozen higher-profile collaboratives have introduced around the earlier 5 years.

“Many nonprofits are standalone functions covering a somewhat smaller support area,” just one hospice CFO from the San Francisco spot instructed Hospice News in 2019. “When you are heading up towards a regional or national chain, you have to band alongside one another.”

An enhanced capacity to agreement with payers, more bargaining ability with sellers and higher economies of scale are a number of of the strategic rewards of “the treatment collaborative model.” In addition to those gains, taking part organizations can freely share – and boost on – finest procedures and protocols.

“One of the factors that truly served us well as considerably as these collaborations was the responsiveness to the COVID pandemic,” Eric Tetzlaff, administrator of Sharon S. Richardson Community Hospice, told Hospice News.

Despite a historical past of good results in hospice, the home well being market place has seen reasonably several treatment collaboratives. But as agencies face mounting troubles and fiercer competitors when simultaneously transitioning absent from fee-for-service Medicare, the system could extremely probable select up steam, I believe.

In this week’s unique, customers-only HHCN+ Update, I check out how treatment collaborations have impacted the hospice field and depth how such a pattern could reward household health suppliers in the long run.