Hospital-at-home programs are in place across hundreds of hospitals in the United States, giving patients with acute illnesses the ability to recover in the comfort of their own homes from conditions that would otherwise require an in-person hospital stay.
“In our business, we often say that what we do is simple – not easy – but simple,” said Alex Hoopes, who leads the Cardinal Health Velocare business, a unit of Cardinal Health at-Home Solutions created to help customers successfully manage the supply chain and logistics of running a hospital-at-home program. “That is, the concept of hospital-at-home is simple – people prefer being at home to recover from illness. But ensuring that a patient has everything they need for a hospital stay at home – technology, supplies, medication, food, in-home and virtual care, and more – is not simple at all.”
Though Hoopes began his career as a licensed pharmacist, his true passion lived within product innovation roles that allowed him to research healthcare trends, including patient preference. His career path led him to Cardinal Health in 2015 – and in 2019, he landed his dream job as director of innovation for Cardinal Health’s promising at-Home Solutions business. (at-Home Solutions serves roughly 6 million people annually living with chronic conditions as a direct-to-patient medical supplies distributor and provider.)
The timing proved fortuitous: As the pandemic began to spread, Cardinal Health was already keeping a close eye on the acceleration of hospital-at-home care as a major growth opportunity. Many of our health system customers were actively exploring or piloting hospital-at-home programs; we were also investing in technology to enable the coordination of such programs.
Leveraging Cardinal Health’s existing relationships with health systems and other industry peers dedicated to this space, Hoopes began working directly with hospital-at-home teams, observing day-to-day operations, learning how care was coordinated in real time and identifying where logistics were not working as they should. He learned that many hospitals were struggling with courier management, timely delivery of supplies and equipment, and inventory coordination.
“I realized that we were perfectly suited to support the hospital-at-home space,” Hoopes explained. “One of its most complex challenges is getting all the key products and supplies through the supply chain to the patient at home – in a matter of hours, nonetheless. Traditional hospitals use centralized systems to manage inventory in a single location, but hospital-at-home programs must deliver products to the hundreds of unique addresses of patients at home. This is exactly what we do daily in at-Home Solutions, so we were already experts in managing that complexity.”
In 2020 and continuing through today, fragmented networks of third-party vendors may be used to deliver medical supplies, durable medical equipment (DME), medications and other critical products directly to patients’ homes.
“This fragmented approach creates inefficiencies and may increase the risk of disruptions that compromise patient care,” Hoopes explains. “If a single delivery is delayed or a critical piece of equipment isn’t available, it can throw the entire care plan off course.”
With abundant data supporting the opportunity, Cardinal Health made an initial start-up investment in Velocare, and Hoopes and his team created a pilot program, working closely with a large Oklahoma-based integrated delivery network (IDN). (An IDN is a network of healthcare providers like hospitals that are linked together to provide a range of healthcare services.) This pilot would become the Velocare solution, formally launched in 2022.
Today, this Cardinal Health-built solution that reimagined last-mile healthcare delivery to meet the speed, complexity and clinical precision required by hospital-at-home is a nationwide operation. Velocare provides ongoing support to dozens of hospital-at-home programs across the country in major metropolitan areas including Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, Atlanta and more.
Learn how the Velocare solution works in this video:
Rob Schlissberg, who leads that Cardinal Health at-Home Solutions team as president, said, “One of the things we’re so proud of is that Velocare is a business that Cardinal Health built from the ground up. It was tremendously meaningful to create something that didn’t exist that truly improves hospital-at-home care.”
Driving adoption
Current findings from the most recent CMS report on the Acute Hospital Care at Home (ACHaH) waiver initiative highlight the benefits of hospital-at-home, including significantly lower 30-day Medicare spending, reduced post-discharge nursing home use, and improved patient and clinician satisfaction. But hospital-at-home’s longevity continues to depend on support from Congressional actions via the Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver program.
Currently, this program is set to expire at the end of September with legislation already introduced on The Hill for a longer-term extension of up to five years. If approved, hospitals would have a valuable opportunity to keep building on the momentum of hospital-at-home’s capabilities to improve patient outcomes and drive down costs.
“We believe that hospital-at-home is the future of acute care delivery," Schlissberg said. "Hospital-at-home redefines the care that is delivered, what is required to deliver it, and opens the door to new possibilities for how and where advanced care can be provided.”
Hoopes and his team envision several transformative trends that could shape the future of this care model:
With Velocare, at-Home Solutions has created a blueprint for scalable, reliable logistics in hospital-at-home programs built to withstand their evolving needs. As home-based care models continue to evolve, Velocare is ready to support the next wave of growth in care-at-home delivery, and Hoopes is excited to lead the charge. He said, “Delivering care outside hospital walls requires a supply chain that is as responsive and adaptable as the care itself. We designed Velocare to meet that need – ensuring that patients, families, and clinicians can focus on what matters most: recovery and care.”
To learn more about Velocare, click here.