On the heels of a new partnership with AARP, Oak Street Health Inc. (NYSE: OSH) has affirmed its commitment to delivering care in the home setting.
Founded in 2012, Chicago-based Oak Street Health is a network of value-based primary care centers for adults on Medicare. The company currently operates more than 100 centers across 15 states, serving over 100,000 older adults. Its service lines include behavioral health, pharmacy and primary care, among others.
Even though Oak Street Health isn’t a traditional home health provider, the company’s willingness to offer care in the most appropriate setting became even more evident at the onset of the COVID-19 emergency last year.
“We had always done some form of home-based care, but when the pandemic hit it became important that we get our patients — who honestly face the highest risk for coronavirus and all the downstream consequences of that — home,” Griffin Myers, chief medical officer at Oak Street Health, told Home Health Care News. “We quickly pivoted to get our patients home and out of the center until we were able to transition back.”
At the time, this meant shifting from an entirely center-based model that was supplemented by home-based care to a majority telehealth model, enabling seniors to receive virtual visits from their homes.
Additionally, Oak Street Health complemented these services by delivering everything from meals to supplies, such as toilet paper and more, to seniors.
While Oak Street Health has transitioned back to its original model, it has retained a lot of that home-based care that aided its patients in the earlier part of the public health emergency.
“We do hundreds of home-based care visits a day,” Myers said. “The visits come in three flavors.”
One of the ways Oak Street Health enters the home is by providing check-ins meant to assess the safety of the senior’s residence. These home check-ins are conducted by the company’s licensed clinical social workers.
Another home-based care service Oak Street Health offers is its mobile integrated health model. This offering is available to the company’s highest-acuity patients. The model gives patients an on-demand team that visits patients in their homes, both for clinical and non-clinical urgencies.
“[This ranges from] medication education in the home to having to address some other adverse social determinants,” Myers said. “That team can pretty quickly mobilize and get in to do this.”
Overall, the company’s most robust effort, regarding the home setting, is its home-based primary care model where licensed clinicians enter the home.
In general, home-based primary care programs send primary care physicians and other medical professionals into the home setting to provide care for high-risk, medically complex patients. Compared to the traditional office or facility-based model, house calls give doctors a chance to observe social aspects of health while often spending more time with patients.
“Those three services are all orchestrated centrally, so we know which patients need what and how we can serve them,” Myers said. “What we’re trying to do is recognize that patients have different needs. The common theme is that they’re in the home. We have been able to build teams to go solve those problems for them in that setting.”
Oak Street Health typically sees a 50% reduction in hospital admissions compared to national averages, according to Myers.
After seeing success with its value-based care model, a recent AARP partnership has added another feather to Oak Street Health’s cap. AARP selected the organization to provide primary care for Medicare-eligible adults.
In fact, Oak Street Health will be the only primary care provider to carry the AARP name.
“In an effort to increase access to health care and offer guidance and provider choice to their members, AARP did a very extensive national research process to choose a value-based partner, and that’s how we landed there,” Myers said. “We were chosen as that trusted provider, largely because of superior clinical outcomes and patient experience, as well as a dedication to a really unique social mission — which has been in our DNA from the very beginning.”
Myers believes that the partnership may also lead to more opportunities for the organization.
“We have every expectation, given the AARP brand and mindshare, that us being selected as their partner for this purpose, will help us connect with more older adults who are looking for primary care,” he said. “That’s something we’re super excited about.”
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