Mayo, Kaiser Join $110M Funding Round for Hospital-at-Home Company
Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente are once again investing in Medically Home, a company that provides healthcare for acute care patients in their own homes.
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By Anuja Vaidya
- Medically Home, a Boston-based company that operates acute care-at-home programs, has raised $110 million in a new funding round, which includes investments from the likes of Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente.
The company offers a technology platform and services that enable clinicians to provide care for a range of medical conditions — including high-acuity ones typically treated in hospitals — in a patient's home. Medically Home's model involves the creation of medical command centers led by physicians and nurses. The medical command center staff work with field clinicians, including nurses, paramedics, and technicians, to provide care at home.
The company also enables certain surgical procedures to be performed outside the hospital by linking ambulatory surgery centers to the temporary hospital-at-home.
More than 7,000 patients have been treated using the Medically Home model, according to the news release. The hospital-at-home company has worked with various providers across the country, including Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Adventist Health and UNC Health.
Last May, Medically Home received a massive investment from two of the most prominent U.S. health systems: Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic and Oakland, California-based Kaiser Permanente. The organizations poured $100 million into the company with the goal of scaling the Medically Home models they implemented in 2020.
Both systems made additional investments during the most recent funding round, though the amounts were not disclosed.
"With the growing number of people who are aging over 65, we need to create and implement programs that will address the needs of this population at scale," said Stephen Parodi, MD, executive vice president of The Permanente Federation at Kaiser Permanente, in the news release. "Over the next decade, up to a third of the patients who are currently hospitalized in brick-and-mortar hospitals could be cared for at home. Kaiser Permanente believes that providing this type of care is a way to improve access to safe acute and restorative care for an older population and for other patients with serious or complex illnesses."
Efforts to scale home-based healthcare grew amid the COVID-19 pandemic as inpatient facilities were overrun and social distancing mandates were enforced.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services loosened regulations around home-based care by launching the Acute Hospital Care at Home program in November 2020. The program allows participating hospitals to treat certain acute care patients at home using telehealth and remote patient monitoring. As of Dec. 22, 85 health systems, comprising 190 hospitals in 34 states, are approved to participate in the program.
Providers are also advocating for the expansion of hospital-at-home programs and services. Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente joined a group of health systems, which includes Geisinger Health System and Johns Hopkins Medicine, to launch a coalition that aims to back strategies supporting the delivery of hospital-level care at home.
Collectively, these efforts, along with the investments made by providers in Medically Home, indicate a sustained interest in hospital-at-home programs.
"The partnership with Medically Home advances Mayo Clinic mission and values that are optimized for the digital age," said Maneesh Goyal, chief operating officer of the Mayo Clinic Platform, in the news release. "The new round of investment affirms the power of partnerships with like-minded organizations and will help more people have the choice to experience this unique model of care in the comfort of their homes."
Other investors in the latest financing round for Medically Home include Baxter International Inc., Global Medical Response, and Cardinal Health.
