Understanding Comprehensive Care at Home

Since its inception in 2015, Contessa has been on the forefront of bringing advanced medical care to the home. It is no surprise, then, that the natural evolution of our footprint has now expanded to include the full continuum of care.

Comprehensive Care at Home is Contessa’s answer to meet the increasing demand for healthcare at home. Our years of experience as a joint venture partner with leading health systems like Mount Sinai Health System in New York have allowed us to build a scalable model of care delivery that reflects three distinct service lines, with more to come. Which is precisely why Amedisys Inc. acquired Contessa in 2021, and together, can now offer an even more robust, high-quality spectrum of additional services to our partners, providers and patients.

By partnering with Contessa, healthcare systems and payers have a unique opportunity to get ahead of the curve and be an instrumental part of realizing a full spectrum of care services in the home. With our change management, IT infrastructure and human resources support, we give healthcare systems the opportunity to define the future of care.

What is Comprehensive Care at Home?

In 2022, we introduced Comprehensive Care at Home as the umbrella term for our model, which serves patients in a full continuum of care from primary care to end-of-life, all in the comfort of their home. This care model spans the spectrum from higher to lower-acuity, with three primary service lines:

Recovery Care at Home

Our Recovery Care at Home model offers a safe and effective alternative to the traditional inpatient hospital stay. Our care teams are equipped to deliver hospital-level care where patients prefer it most: their homes.

In this model, eligible patients are assessed by a doctor at their point of access, either the emergency room, observation unit, urgent care clinic or primary care practice. Eligible patients can also enter the program from the inpatient floor once they are stable, and complete their hospital stay in their home.

After opting into the program, patients are given all the technology and education they need to receive care at home, with reimbursement supported by either the Medicare Fee-for-Service (FFS) program or by our bundled care episodes.

These patients receive regular in-home nursing visits and telehealth consultations from physicians, with end-to-end care coordination that improves outcomes.

Rehabilitation Care at Home

Our Rehabilitation Care at Home model moves beyond high-acuity care to post-acute care and offers a safe and effective alternative to the traditional skilled nursing facility (SNF) stay. Traditionally, many patients are transferred to a SNF after their hospital stay to participate in rehabilitation and receive skilled nursing-level care.

With this model, eligible patients can return home and receive the same high-quality rehabilitation and skilled nursing care they would receive at a SNF. This includes physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy and more. Eligible patients can enter this program with a referral from the hospital or their primary care physician.

Rehabilitation Care at Home has proven to be a nimble solution to the ongoing challenges of decreased SNF availability and concerns about infection risk in facility settings. Like our Recovery Care at Home program, patients receive technology support and education needed to participate in care at their home, both in-person and via telehealth, for up to 60 days.

Palliative Care at Home

Our Palliative Care at Home model offers eligible patients additional support for serious illness, by providing services tailored to patients living with complex, chronic or advanced stage illnesses. This medical specialty focuses on improving and maintaining quality of life for patients and offers ongoing home-based care for patients with significant illness.

Our interdisciplinary team is comprised of physicians, advanced practice providers, social workers, community health workers, nurses and others. It offers eligible patients and their families help with symptom management and emotional support, care coordination between providers, and education about their condition and treatment options. Palliative care also provides personalized goals of care and advance care planning, advocacy on a patient’s behalf, and referrals to community services and other healthcare specialists.

Eligible patients can enter Palliative Care at Home through our other service lines, via a specialist or primary care provider’s referral, or through their health plan. This program provides a bridge to transition to hospice care as well. It can be put in place at any stage of an illness, regardless of prognosis, and even if a patient is receiving curative care.

What are the benefits of adopting Comprehensive Care at Home?

Along with the three service lines discussed above, Amedisys brings home health and hospice services to the table. This continuum of care in the home is the culmination of years of experience in driving change management and designing a proven reimbursement structure that decreases costs and delivers increased revenue.

More and more hospital systems are seeing the value of this scalable model and are joining us as a joint venture partnership to launch Comprehensive Care at Home. Most recently, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) signed on to our full suite of services, while other longtime partners like Mount Sinai Health System have chosen to expand their existing programs to include our fully integrated network of care in the home.

It’s clear these health systems recognize the following benefits of adopting Comprehensive Care at Home:

For patients

It’s no surprise that more and more patients are demonstrating a preference for care at home. It not only makes healthcare more accessible for many patients, but it also reduces healthcare fragmentation and allows us to positively impact social determinants of health. This is reflected in our reduced readmission rates, improved outcomes, and positive patient satisfaction ratings.

For hospital systems

We align incentives between hospital systems and payers, using a structure of value-based care initiatives. This helps us solve the key challenges that hospital systems face, by helping to lower the cost of care, aiming to increase profits, reducing staffing constraints and answering the growing patient demand for this kind of care.

For payers

Multiple payers have put a vote of confidence in Contessa’s bundled episodes of care. Our ability to share risk in our programs is fully supported by Care Convergence, our proprietary data and logistics technology. With episodic savings compared to historical cost, these payers understand the fiscal benefits of Contessa’s joint venture structure.

The bridge between Comprehensive Care at Home and the future of healthcare

Healthcare is evolving rapidly to meet the emerging trends associated with care in the home. At the end of 2022, Congress approved an extension of the Medicare FFS waivers that helped hospital-at-home services grow substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The benefits discussed above are driving hospital systems and payers to join patients in the increased demand for these solutions. Comprehensive Care at Home provides these solutions with a class of healthcare at home that is unparalleled in the industry.

Contessa is poised to continue a history of effective and safe leadership in this model of care. To learn more about how a partnership with us can support your organization with a scalable program of comprehensive care in the home, contact info@contessahealth.com. Together, we will redefine the future of healthcare.