Home-Based Care Receives Boost from Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente Partnership

The trend of shifting hospital-based care to home sites is resulting in a number of initiatives that increasingly expand the role that home-based care providers are now playing. Often, this trend targets specific conditions including cancer care.

COVID-19 has resulted in an increased emphasis on home care and telehealth, as providers have reduced in-person visits during the pandemic.

Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente are partnering in an unprecedented collaboration to allow more patients to receive acute level of care and recovery services in the comfort, convenience and safety of their homes.

Beginning with significant strategic investments in Medically Home Group, a Boston-based, technology-enabled services company, Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente seek to expand access to this unique model and encourage health systems and care providers to adopt it.

By building capacity to meet rapidly increasing demand while addressing regulatory and legislative barriers, the partnership will allow more patients across the U.S. to safely receive high-quality acute and restorative care in their homes.

Medically Home’s technology and services platform enables providers to address a significant range of clinical conditions at the higher end of the clinical acuity spectrum that are typically treated in traditional hospital settings, safely in a patient’s home. This includes routine infections and chronic disease exacerbation, emergency medicine, cancer care, acute level of COVID-19 care and transfusions.

Both Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente are successfully using Medically Home’s scalable care delivery model today for their patients, and the number of patients cared for using this model continues to grow.

In addition, nonprofit organizations, such as Adventist Health, ProMedica and UNC Health, use Medically Home’s model of care. Medically Home also partners with Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in their randomized clinical trial of supportive oncology care in the home.

Mayo Clinic launched its advanced care at home program last summer at Mayo Clinic in Florida and Mayo Clinic Health System in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to deliver complex, comprehensive care and restorative services to qualifying patients in their homes.

Kaiser Permanente launched its hospital care at home program in two regions last year, admitting patients from multiple hospitals across both its Northern California and Oregon locations. In this model, Kaiser Permanente has a single medical command center in each region supporting multiple hospitals to care for patients longitudinally across their acute and restorative phases.

Takeaway: As home-based programs develop, the role of the hospital in the treatment of patients will evolve. Home-based care will transition to serve as a more central care setting for a significant percentage of patients