The senior care company Lifespark has been building out its value-based care model for years. Now, it has added in-home urgent care, a key service line for a company taking on upside and downside risk.
Ultimately, the goal is to reduce unnecessary emergency room visits or hospitalizations. The urgent care service line will be added to Lifespark COMPLETE, Lifespark’s value-based population health business.
The Minnesota-based company provides home health, home care, hospice, primary care and senior living, among other services. Those services are offered to a wide range of patients. Within Lifespark COMPLETE, however, all of those services are available to members.
In COMPLETE, Lifespark has taken global risk. It is responsible for patient outcomes, full stop. And, while many home-based care companies want to take on more risk, it comes with a lot of responsibility.
That’s why in-home urgent care was added, according to Lifespark CEO Joel Theisen. It was one of the last situations where the company felt like it needed to fill a gap for its patients.
“We’re taking full, upside-downside risk,” Theisen said. “And we’re building brick, by brick, by brick. We felt this was important. With what we saw in our data, we needed it. We always wanted to do it.”
The mobile and urgent response team is made up of nurses and paramedics. They can deliver care in the home to prevent a hospitalization, but also can coordinate a visit to the hospital if that is what the patient needs. In the latter situation – where a patient does need to go to the hospital – Lifespark’s team is able to brief the inpatient facility on the specifics of a patient to ensure interoperability.
Lifespark will also be coordinating telehealth visits with doctors as part of the in-home urgent care offering.
“When someone goes into the hospital [unnecessarily], the experience is horrible,” Theisen said. “The costs are horrible. It’s like a bomb going off. And that’s where delirium sets in. That’s where all this fear and angst sets in. As we were strategizing, we knew we had the proactive, the predictive and the prescriptive pieces down, but we needed the acute reactive. We needed the urgent response, because when we do miss, we have to stay connected – because we know the member better than anyone else.”
Lifespark will also ensure a safe and seamless transition back to the home after a hospital visit, if it’s needed.
Dexter Braff, the founder and president of the M&A firm The Braff Group, told HHCN last year that the best way for a home-based care company to go at risk would be to build a home-based care continuum from the start.
In essence, that is what Lifespark has been trying to do.
“Who’s going to say, ‘I’m going to build my organization specifically to go at risk with payers. I’m not worried about the silos that are artificially created by Medicare, Medicaid, or hospitals,’” Braff said. “You’d do home health, hospice infusion therapy, home medical care, physician housecalls, build that organization and have some capacity in a very, very tight footprint. Then go to the payers and say, ‘I’ll take care of all that, and I’m going to charge you X number of dollars per member, per month.’”
Right now, Lifespark COMPLETE is a Minnesota operation, though Lifespark does do work outside of the state. The COMPLETE census is generally around 3,000 or more.
In the future, Theisen wants the operation to grow – by number and by geography.
“Our plan is to take this nationally,” Theisen said. “But for now, we’re going to do everything we can to keep learning, through the data and through listening to our customer base on how to make it better. It’s going to be slow, it’s going to be iterative. But it is definitely not just a flash in the pan.”
As part of the in-home urgent care launch, Peter Carlson has also joined Lifespark as the VP of acute response services.
Carlson previously served as the chief of paramedicine for Medically Home, as well as the community paramedic coordinator (and operations manager) for Mayo Clinic.
“We have a big commitment here, and I hope the nation follows,” Theisen said. “I hope people really feel that they can actually take the risks, and actually get in the game in a more meaningful way to serve seniors.”
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