Compassus CEO Mike Asselta sees more joint ventures in the home care company's future, following the announcement Tuesday of a partnership with Providence.
Under the arrangement, Compassus will manage and jointly own Providence's home health, hospice, community-based palliative care and private duty nursing services. The Brentwood, Tennessee-based company signed similar deals this year with Cincinnati-based Bon Secours Mercy Health and Columbus, Ohio-based OhioHealth. It has been providing home-based services to St. Louis-based Ascension Health since 2019.
Related: Providence, Compassus form home care joint venture
Asselta said in an interview Compassus is in talks with other nonprofit health systems, as well as for-profit systems, about potential partnerships. The need for increased capital investments in everything from technology to staffing will likely drive additional joint ventures, he said. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is behind these joint ventures?
From our partners side, there is a recognition of the leverage we can create in home care with hospice, palliative care, home health, rehab and therapy at home. They recognize that they need an accountable partner. I think there is continued momentum, and you can reasonably expect that there will be more of these.
We bring scale. We bring technology. We bring a focus. Hospitals have a lot of things to focus on these days. There is a lot of competition for their capital and their eyeballs from their management teams.
How do these joint ventures improve access to care?
All of our partners have terrific brands in their communities. We are not only signing up for the joint venture to serve the hospital and the legacy hospital system, we also recognize there is an opportunity to serve the community.
Many hospital systems don’t have their own home health or hospice assets, so the joint venture will provide those services in the community to other hospitals. That is a new feature.
Would your joint venture strategy work with a for-profit health system?
Partnerships will absolutely work with a for-profit system. Our mission and vision align really closely with those that are nonprofit. I think some of the momentum in nonprofits is that they are seeing a for-profit partner that they can trust to stay on mission and serve their communities. I think the same thing would work for for-profit hospital systems that have the same mission-driven, community-minded approach as nonprofit hospitals. To the extent that our values match up and our mission matches well, we can execute our joint ventures across for-profit systems.
Are you considering expanding into other services, such as hospital-at-home?
Hospital-at-home is a very high-level acuity that you are trying to serve at home. Home health is something different. Broadly, that is a lower level of acuity.
Where we see ourselves in the near term bridging the acuity gap is skilled nursing-at-home. If the patient is otherwise bound for a skilled nursing facility to recover from a procedure, if the patient is eligible and it makes sense for the patient to recover at home, we see an opportunity with more skilled nursing facility-like services at home. The features that sort of bolster home care into skilled nursing-at-home include remote patient monitoring or more closely integrated durable medical equipment, and visits from a nurse practitioner or even a physician at home. These are expansive beyond the traditional home health model.
Can technology and innovation drive better outcomes?
We think innovation that drives a visit from the caregiver at an appropriate time is one of the benefits health systems get from a joint venture partnership.
There are a lot of predictive analytics behind our home-based electronic medical record system that tell us when we need to be there for the patient. That is not going to be contained in a hospital-based system. That is something that we have built and has been integrated with our home-based system.
Of course, everyone is dealing with the opportunities that are created by artificial intelligence. We have a very distinct investment in artificial intelligence as it can be applied in home care. That is a very unique application. With Compassus, they get those innovations that are driven by AI as part of the partnership.
Is home health technology becoming a heavy lift for hospital systems?
I don’t know that health systems would say the reason for entering the joint venture is just for technology, but it is something we believe allows us to manage patient care at home better. There is a lot of competition for where hospitals are going to invest in technology, so a whole suite of innovation and investment in home health is going to be relatively low on their priority given other opportunities hospital systems have.
The technology to serve the home is different. If they are going to invest in an electronic medical records system that is specific for what we do at home and in hospice, that is a new system they don’t have.
Interoperability between the home-based electronic medical record and the hospital-based system is crucial. There needs to be integrity as we are making the referral from the hospital to the home-based provider, information needs to flow one way. And as we develop the care plan for the patient, the information has to flow back to the practitioners at the hospital that have to review that.
