Hospital-at-home: HME providers wanted

YARMOUTH, Maine - Hospital-at-home isn’t a trend, it’s a movement, and it needs HME providers, says Rami Karjian, who was the keynote speaker at the virtual HME News Business Summit in September. 

The COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t just changed how people feel about going to the hospital, given the well-documented bed and staffing shortages, it’s also changed the way they view remote care, he said. 

“The idea—that Amazon, frankly, started—that I'm better off when things come to me as opposed to me going to traditional (brick-and-mortar) sites is what’s really making this more than just a phase,” said Karjian, co-founder and CEO of Medically Home Group. “Patients are going to demand that this doesn't revert to what we had.” 

Even if an HME provider doesn’t currently have a contract or agreement with their local hospital or health system offering hospital-at-home programs, they shouldn’t let that deter them, because those hospitals and health systems need scale, says Karjian. 

“Picture 20% of all hospital beds now being in patients' homes,” he said. “If a patient needs an infusion at 11:00PM, or an X-ray, or a PICC line, it’s not an option not to have it because at that point you’re transferring a patient back to a brick-and-mortar facility. So, for each of the 18 services that are required in a hospital, we now have to be able to provide that as a community in the home and we have to provide it with the redundancy of having a backup, and a backup to the backup.” 

The good news is that providers won’t need to spend time selling hospital-at-home to hospitals, because the awareness is already there, says Karjian. 

“The thing that's holding them back is the confidence that these services can get delivered at hospital-level standards of availability, accessibility and on-demand turn-around time,” he said. “So, creating that confidence among your hospital partners that you can do that, is what it's going to take.”