Stronger Together: How Contessa Partners with Your Clinical Team

It’s no secret: partnering with Contessa can transform already-prominent hospitals and health-systems into highly desired destinations of true patient-centered care. Our organization works with partners who share a dedication to offering the right care for patients at the right time in the best place suited for their needs: the home. 

The truth is, though, none of this happens overnight. From the first day after a partnership is formed, our teams work collaboratively to bring operational, clinical, and change management expertise to help clinical teams smoothly deliver hospital care at home. Our model is a more effective and more efficient process than the traditional means of beginning a hospital care at home program.  

How We Succeed, Together

Contessa establishes joint venture partnerships with health systems, not vendor relationships. It is crucial that our program is partly owned by the health system. And, importantly, there is no going it alone. We have unlocked the elements of providing acute care in the home alongside our partners and, with a lot of hard work and trial-and-error, we have optimized it over the course of six years. 

First and foremost, we prioritize patient safety. Since our inception, we have been building and refining some of the most robust patient safety guidelines and protocols in the healthcare at home space. With every partnership we form, the partner’s medical teams have expressed gratitude for the thoughtful, detailed approach we take toward delivering high-quality clinical care. 

Another strength of our program is in detailed care coordination. Our care coordinators are registered nurses who are invested in the patient’s complete wellbeing from the onset of admission all the way through the end of the monitoring phase. Thinking about each patient’s unique needs and obstacles, Contessa care coordinators continuously work to address patients with their whole care team, using a multidisciplinary approach with patients and their physicians in the center of a collaborative care team. The resulting integration and accountability allow our teams to deliver the highest-quality care. 

The Benefits of Partnership and Scale

We focus on the provision of care in the home in the same way hospitals do, allowing clinicians to focus on caring for their patients rather than worrying about non-clinical minutiae. A central focus is on ensuring clinical workflows that are user friendly and constantly improving with feedback from our teams across the country, especially doctors, nurses and case managers. 

Rather than a frenetic experience marked by interruptions and discontinuities, working with Contessa allows nurses more time with their patients—average visits are twice a day for at least an hour—which means they can focus on thorough evaluation, treatment administration, and building a personal connection with every patient. Both patients and their families can feel the difference that more time makes, which has resulted in an over 90 percent average patient satisfaction rate for Contessa joint venture care. 

For physicians, Contessa’s model appeals to those who want to make a bigger impact or embrace modern medicine in nontraditional formats, such as telemedicine. And like our nurses, physicians enjoy the space to talk with patients and their families for the time they need, which means greater satisfaction for our providers, patients, and families alike. 

Long-Term Implications 

As our clinical partners deepen relationships with Contessa, they increasingly improve both their efficiency and speed in delivering acute care in the home. Each health system moves at their own pace, so the time it takes to integrate Contessa workflows can vary. Different systems that have more detailed processes in place can both adopt and adapt at faster rates. Despite variations in progression, usually within a year of partnering with Contessa, clinical teams harness our shared data and see the program’s key outcomes. Patients and families report high satisfaction with the level of care they get in their homes. Providers also are highly satisfied and burn out less after acclimating to the model because it feels rewarding to see the positive effects of their work. 

Looking further out, we plan to create opportunities for these clinical teams to get published in research and academic publications, setting a standard across our partnerships. Two of our partner health systems have already published data in the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA Internal Medicine. 

Additionally, the COVID pandemic forced health systems to rapidly adopt and adapt to innovative care models and virtual technology that allow patients more autonomy and ownership of how they access care. Regulators have given unprecedented support to these elements with the Hospitals Without Walls waivers and more than 200 hospitals across 92 health systems in 34 states have already received approval to expand where they provide care. Contessa was already solving for key elements of these care models long before this with emphasis on value based, shared risk models that are designed for longevity and longstanding health system impact. 

The key message to clinical teams is this: hospital care at home is only growing. And it works. We know it is beneficial for the right patients when we bring in procedures and protocols that make their lives easier and more fulfilling. Ultimately, everyone benefits, including the health system, and there are not many occasions in healthcare where the stars all align.