UnityPoint Health Pulls Together Suite of At-Home Services

A leader in home-based care innovation, Iowa-based UnityPoint Health has pulled together a group of home-based services under the UnityPoint at Home umbrella. Speaking at the fall NAACOS  conference last week, Mag VanOosten, R.N.,president and chief clinical officer of UnityPoint at Home, described how they combined their comprehensive in-home care offerings.

“The secret sauce has been being able to pull our at-home services together under UnityPoint at Home,” VanOosten said. Their comprehensive in-home care includes home health, hospice, infusion therapy, rehabilitation, and home medical equipment (HME) services. In fall 2020, the UnityPoint at Home Acute Hospital Care at Home program was one of six national health systemsapproved for the CMS Acute Hospital Care at Home demonstration. In February 2021 UnityPoint at Home was the first in the nation to admit and bill for patients.

“We started in 2016 with a proof of concept with just our NextGen ACO patients, saying we can do an expedited discharge, take the patients home, keep them home safely, have better outcomes, save the hospitals money and not take anything away from them because they were getting the full DRG [diagnosis-related group payment],” she explained. “We did that for a full quarter and then took the data that we collected and built our business plan. When you're in a hospital-based system trying to take patients out of the hospital, it took about a year to get everyone convinced. Our aim was to develop a proactive ambulatory-based alternate care solution. We wanted to reduce the patient's need to go into the emergency room, into the hospital, and into the skilled nursing facilities.”