Former Vice President Al Gore believes he is as big of a proponent for home-based care as he is the environment.
Well, maybe not quite. But he did express a lot of enthusiasm for delivering health care in the home at Home Care 100 Monday, both with surface-level compliments and more in-depth arguments.
Specifically, Gore discussed how and why more money should be diverted to providers in both personal home care and home health care.
“Home care is central to the sustainable health care system,” he said. “For me, a sustainable health care system is one that provides the right care, in the right place, at the right time, to everyone. And that involves a focus on prevention, rehabilitation, and keeping patients out of the hospital by offering cost-effective, high-quality care and surroundings that are comfortable and beneficial for their physical and mental health. This is why home care has been a simple plank of President Biden’s agenda.”
Gore has invested in the home care space himself. His investment fund – Generation Investment Management – recently led a $185 million funding round into the home-focused software and technology company AlayaCare.
On its end, the Montreal, Canada-based AlayaCare works with over 500 home care agencies in the U.S., Australia and Canada, and it is currently expanding its services aggressively to cover more home health agencies in the U.S.
Gore’s Generation Investment Management’s portfolio also includes Baxter International, which has a portfolio of diagnostic, critical and kidney care solutions, along with a suite of hospital and surgical products used in patient homes, hospitals and physician offices.
That’s noteworthy because Baxter International just led a $110 million strategic investment into the hospital-at-home enabler Medically Home.
In the future, Gore argued that more value and risk should be transferred to home-based care providers. That, he said, would lead to better outcomes and lower total cost of health care expenses in the country, which are two reasons why more funding should be diverted into the home.
For instance, he touted the expansion of Home Health Value-Based Purchasing (HHVBP) Model as a sensible regulatory shift.
He also advocated for the funding initially included in the Build Back Better Plan, which would have originally brought $400 billion to home- and community-based services (HCBS) in the U.S. A gutted version of the plan, before falling through, even included $150 billion for HCBS.
“Value is what this industry provides,” Gore said.
Of course, it wouldn’t have been a Gore speech without the mention of climate change. He said that the changing climate will undoubtedly bring new challenges to home-based care’s providers and workers.
“These are consequences that will directly impact your industry,” Gore said. “Some of you have already felt the impact of these climate crises with enhanced storms and floods, for example. The climate crisis is also a health crisis. … I don’t need to tell all of you about the life or death consequences of unexpected power loss or flooded generators. Likewise, extreme heat events are becoming more frequent, more severe and are putting the most vulnerable at the highest risk.”
Many providers tend to agree.
In September, Brent Korte, the chief home care officer at EvergreenHealth, told Home Health Care News that severe climate events were affecting providers all over the West Coast.
“We’re graded on our ability to improve [the condition of a patient],” Korte said. “So how can we improve these patients when they literally can’t breathe well because it’s too hot in their house? I don’t see how it couldn’t be affecting every home health provider on the West Coast, and I wouldn’t isolate it to just us. I think climate change — in some regard — is impacting the entire industry nationally.”
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