Why Care Collaborations Could Shake Up the Home Health Food Chain

In the animal kingdom, there’s toughness in figures, specifically between creatures that obtain them selves towards the base of the foods chain. This thought is also true in today’s hyper-competitive health care sector.

Increasingly, smaller sized vendors with relatively minimal resources and arrive at are teaming up in the kind of “collaboratives,” “alliances,” “networks” or “partnerships.” Nowhere is this development a lot more widespread than in hospice, exactly where at the very least a dozen high-profile collaboratives have launched over the past five yrs.

“Many nonprofits are standalone operations covering a somewhat modest company spot,” a single hospice CFO from the San Francisco area told Hospice News in 2019. “When you are heading up against a regional or national chain, you have to band with each other.”

An increased potential to agreement with payers, much more bargaining power with distributors and increased economies of scale are a handful of of the strategic rewards of “the treatment collaborative product.” In addition to those people gains, taking part corporations can freely share – and enhance on – best practices and protocols.

“One of the items that actually served us very well as considerably as these collaborations was the responsiveness to the COVID pandemic,” Eric Tetzlaff, administrator of Sharon S. Richardson Community Hospice, explained to Hospice Information.

In spite of a background of accomplishment in hospice, the home health sector has seen rather number of treatment collaboratives. But as companies face mounting challenges and fiercer competition whilst concurrently transitioning away from fee-for-service Medicare, the technique could incredibly most likely choose up steam, I think.

In this week’s exceptional, customers-only HHCN+ Update, I investigate how care collaborations have impacted the hospice industry and element how such a pattern could gain dwelling health suppliers in the upcoming.