DispatchHealth is launching two additional clinical service offerings — Advanced Care and Extended Care — which give patients who previously required expensive facility-based acute care the ability to be treated at home. The new services will initially be offered via Denver Health Medical Plan and InnovAge in the Denver metro area.
The new services are ideal for patients who require an advanced level of clinical care and would benefit from staying home to recover from their acute illness over multiple days. The Advanced Care service provides patients comprehensive medical care in their home as an alternative to being admitted to a hospital. Extended Care provides up to 30-days of in-home clinical support for patients who are transitioning from the hospital but are still in need of extended specialized care.
Both Advanced Care and Extended Care offer qualified patients an on-call dedicated DispatchHealth medical team, which includes an internal medicine trained physician and a physician assistant or nurse practitioner. Patients receive 24/7 physician coverage with remote monitoring, an emergency call button and daily visits from DispatchHealth’s medical team, including bed-side nursing. Coordination of other common services is also available for patients as needed, including physical and respiratory therapy, imaging services, pharmacy and meal deliveries.
“Our new services builds on DispatchHealth’s current offerings to help patients with complex medical needs avoid unnecessary hospital admissions and post-acute facility-based care. We are confident the services will result in improved clinical outcomes and drive further value to our payer and provider partners,” Mark Prather, CEO of DispatchHealth, said in a statement. “We’ve proven our ability to effectively treat acutely ill patients in a low-cost setting and we’re ready to lead the industry shift to provide more advanced clinical care in the home. We look forward to analyzing the outcomes.”
More than 7,500 patients in Colorado now have access to DispatchHealth’s Advanced and Extended care services. Advanced Care services are available to participants enrolled in InnovAge’s Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) in the Denver metro area; and both Advanced and Extended Care are available via Denver Health Medical Plan and its hospital partner, Denver Health. DispatchHealth plans to expand the service to additional markets in 2020 and will be covered by most major insurances.
Since launching in 2015, DispatchHealth has delivered high-acuity care to over 125,000 patients in the home and helped save over $162.5 million in medical costs. In addition to its new service lines, DispatchHealth offers acute care services to treat simple to complex injuries and illnesses in more than 18 cities and is rapidly expanding to new cities across the country.