How Home Care Providers Can ‘Transform’ To Ride The Hospital-At-Home Wave

This article was originally published in Home Health Care News on October 2, 2024. As more advanced care moves into the home setting, traditional home-based care providers can ensure they aren’t left behind by forming innovative partnerships.

The collaboration between BrightStar Care and Medically Home is one example of this.

“More care is moving into the home, and higher acuity care is moving into the home,” Shelly Sun Berkowitz, founder and executive chairwoman of BrightStar Care, said during a panel discussion at Home Health Care News’ FUTURE conference in August. “I think that’s exciting, but home care providers that have been more on the non-medical side need to start thinking about how they transform and move into higher levels of acuity. I think that’s where a lot of the opportunity is going to be.”

Chicagoland-based BrightStar Care offers personal home care, as well as supplemental staffing and home health care. It has over 400 franchise locations across the U.S.

On its end, Boston-based Medically Home partners with organizations to help them deliver hospital-at-home services, as well as emergency department services in the home. The company coordinates in-home visits, sets up the proper technology and equipment, and pulls together all of the necessary resources.

Medically Home and BrightStar Care have been partners since 2018. At the time, the former was in “startup mode” and was attracted to BrightStar Care’s approach.

“BrightStar came in with this entrepreneurial approach to our work together,” Dr. Pippa Shulman, chief medical officer at Medically Home, said during the discussion. “It was immediately, ‘How can we solve the problem that you have, and not be constrained by our idea of what home care medicine looks like?’ It was really future thinking. Now, we’ve both grown. We’re both different organizations, and we’ve really committed to partner together, and when we need new nursing services, BrightStar is our primary partner going forward.”

Shulman is a hospital-at-home pioneer, and previously told HHCN that “the tipping point is coming” in relation to that type of care in the U.S.

In 2023, BrightStar Care expanded its higher-acuity care services by rolling out primary in-home clinician and transport services in Arizona.

“We’re a franchise organization, so we went and bought back several of our franchisees, made a multi-million dollar investment in Arizona to own the territory, control the territory,” Sun said. “We believed hospital at home would be so important for the growth of our brand and the transformation of health care in our country. We wanted to make sure we could spend the money, get the vehicles right, meet all the expectations of a great partner, but we felt like that’d be difficult to do, if we were relying just on a franchisee.”

Sun noted that this strategy allowed the company to work out the kinks before pulling in franchise owners.

“It’s a great way for us to be able to take a company-owned marketplace, spend our capital – not a franchisee’s capital – and figure it out, get the bumps out, and then once it’s ready, roll it out to our network,” she said. “I think we learned a lot together, built a great program there … and continue to make lots of impact for our franchisees across the country. As a good franchisor, I don’t want the franchisees having to spend their hard earned capital figuring it out. I have a much greater capacity to do that as a franchisor.”

Since then, BrightStar Care — in partnership with Medically Home — has expanded this effort.

In April, the company rolled out these services in California and New Jersey, and they’re offering this care in six states.

Ultimately, Shulman believes that the home should be the center of health care in the future.

“I’m not saying we don’t need hospitals,” she said. “We do, but we need ICUs, and surgery centers and a place for traumas [patients] to go. Almost everything else we can do at home.”