Ohio’s Hospice, a group of 10 affiliated providers located throughout that state, has launched a new venture called Pure Healthcare, featuring a three-story facility as well as an innovative care model designed to support quality of life and for seriously ill patients, allowing them to age in place.
The 36,000-square-foot facility is located on the campus of Miami Valley Hospital South in Dayton, Ohio. At the facility, palliative care specialists will support individualized, person-centered care, health services and education.
“This is a new program within Ohio’s Hospice that really represents a rebranding of all non-hospice activity in our network. We are repackaging all the palliative care, chronic care management work that we’re doing across the state and putting it under a separate product,” Anthony Evans, president of Pure Healthcare, told Hospice News. “We view it as a community-based care management model for chronic conditions, and so would be inclusive of an engagement at the community level through care managers that would develop a longitudinal plan of care. We are also able to offer inpatient palliative care services.”
Ohio’s Hospice is a regional partnership of hospice providers, founded in 2013 with three member organizations and in the intervening years expanded to 10 members, in addition to entering into joint ventures and other community organizations. Regional partnerships such as Ohio’s Hospice help non-profit hospice organizations compete with for-profit entities that during the past decade have come to dominate the hospice market.
The new facility includes an ambulatory palliative care clinic and in addition will offer exercise physiology, occupational therapy and behavioral health care services. The building features a nutritional and demonstration kitchen where trained staff can educate patients and families on nutrition and how to prepare meals consistent with dietary guidelines associated with their conditions.
“We see a group of folks with chronic conditions, and we’re engaging them in that entire spectrum of service,” Evans said. “It brings us back to that heritage of hospice, that holistic model of care which touches more than medical symptoms and clinical needs. That’s really what we intend to package within the Pure Health Care model.”
In addition to the services provided at the facility, Pure Healthcare provides community-based care management as well as palliative care and other services in patient homes.
The home care component includes the use of a smartphone app-based remote patient monitoring systems that patients can use to log administration of their prescribed medications, track exercise and activity, and chart their comfort levels, among other information, generating metrics aggregated on dashboards that are available to clinicians.
Pure Healthcare is negotiating with payers to help fund these services and program management. The organization’s proposals to payers typically include a per-member, per-month fee for managing the payers chronically ill or high-risk populations. They are working with a number of payers currently in pilot programs.
“We also would love to be able to create some at risk models where we’re able to share savings on that cohort as other high cost settings of care are avoided,” Evans told Hospice News. “We know there’s some savings to be generated as we do a better job of managing symptoms in the community and letting people age in place. There’s been a lot of interest.”
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