Sociologist William Bruce Cameron

Home Care

Optum Competes for Acquisition of Amedisys

We’ve got a good ol’ fashioned home care standoff, with UnitedHealth Group’s Optum division throwing a wrench in Option Care Health’s takeover of Amedisys by submitting a competing offer of $100 per share, 100% cash.

Optum’s offer values Amedisys at about $3.2B, whereas Option Care’s already-accepted all-stock offer valued the home health and hospice provider at $3.6B barely over a month ago.

• Amedisys shareholders now have the option to back out of the Option Care acquisition, which is probably tempting since the all-stock transaction would give them less liquidity, expose them to a ton of downside risk, and was met with pretty tough analyst reactions.

• The Optum announcement prompted Option Care to reiterate its confidence in the acquisition, which it says could reduce costs by over $50M right out of the gate and lead to $9B in combined revenue by 2027 (vs. $6B today).

Besides showing that it can steamroll any would-be competitors’ moves, Optum is picking up home care providers left and right as a way to expand its margins by keeping patients in their homes and out of higher-cost healthcare facilities.

• Amedisys operates close to 350 home health agencies, 160 hospice care centers, and is a major hospital-at-home figure thanks to its 2021 acquisition of Contessa Health.  

Here’s a look at the top five US home health providers and their current market share:

• Kindred – 6.0%
• Amedisys – 5.0%
• LHC Group – 4.4%
• Encompass – 3.9%
• AccentCare – 1.7%

Kindred has already been scooped up by Humana. Amedisys is moments away from an acquisition. LHC group was recently acquired by Optum. It’s anyone’s guess who the next targets are, but there’s a pretty clear trend among the top players.

The Takeaway

Although Amedisys is still bound to its agreement with Option Care, Optum’s approach likely qualifies as a “superior proposal” that would let shareholders dissolve any existing obligations. The market currently looks like it’s picking Optum as its favorite to get the acquisition, with shares of Amedisys jumping over 10% on the new offer, and shares of Option Care also rallying since its investors weren’t too enthused about the acquisition in the first place.

Patient-Centered Design for Diabetes Care

Glooko’s recently overhauled Mobile App makes it easier than ever for diabetes patients to organize, log, visualize, and share their data. Head over to this conversation with Glooko’s product and design team for a behind-the-scenes look at how patient-centered design is improving diabetes outcomes.

3 Ways to Ease the Pain of Provider Credentialing

Is provider credentialing adding cost and time to your bottom line? Check out Medallion’s new blog for three ways to ease the pain of provider credentialing so that you can focus on delivering quality care.

Successful RPM Through End-to-End Support

From needs assessments and program deployment to security enhancements and call center monitoring, Clear Arch Health offers fully customizable support services to help you get the most from your RPM solution.

The Wire

• Reimagining the Nursing Workload: McKinsey’s Reimagining the Nursing Workload report found that 45% of the 2M inpatient nurses in the US plan on leaving their positions in the next six months, a jaw dropping number that’s unfortunately not too surprising considering that nurses currently spend less than 7 hours of a typical 12 hour shift on patient care. McKinsey goes into a variety of ways to reallocate time back to nurses (tech, change management, workflow redesign), which it believes could yield a 15% efficiency boost that would “translate to closing the nursing workforce gap by up to 300,000 inpatient nurses.”

• Clarify Clara Beta Launch: Clarify Health is getting in on the generative AI action with the closed beta launch of Clara, a natural language assistant that leverages Clarify’s claims dataset to deliver actionable data to healthcare professionals in “a fraction of the time it traditionally takes.” Clara will provide a select group of care delivery orgs the ability to tailor the assistant to their unique needs so that they can uncover insights into influenceable behavior changes that help providers deliver high-value care.

• Mayo AI + Google Cloud: In other generative AI news, Mayo Clinic signed an agreement with Google Cloud to make it easier for clinicians to use artificial intelligence to find and summarize information spread across the health system. Mayo will use Google Cloud tools like its Enterprise Search on Generative AI App Builder to help clinicians find and access data that’s hard to locate otherwise, including medical histories, genomic information, and imaging and lab results.

• Estimated SDOH Intervention Costs: SDOH interventions have been proven to help reduce hospital admissions, but a new study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that a lack of federal funding is leaving many patients with unmet social needs. Using three years of National Center for Health Statistics data on 19k patients’ social needs, researchers estimated that SDOH interventions across food, housing, transportation, and care coordination assistance averaged $60 per member per month. Of that cost, only $27 (45%) was federally funded, suggesting that existing federal financing mechanisms fall far short of a comprehensive SDOH approach.

• The True Cost of GLP-1s: The Washington Post published an eye-opening article illustrating how off-label weight loss drugs might soon be a leading driver of healthcare costs in the US. Although Ozempic and similar GLP-1 inhibitors are not-yet approved for weight loss, the author made the case that if these drugs were covered by the health plans of everyone who wanted them it could double healthcare costs overnight, while completely overshadowing any cost reductions from the weight loss itself.

• New Apple Health Features: Apple’s WWDC23 is a wrap, and while the Vision Pro XR headset stole most of the spotlight, the tech giant also rolled out several new mental health and vision health features. To start, emotion tracking functionality was added to the Health app to let users record how different social settings and activity metrics impact their mental health. Apple also debuted new Watch features that measure time spent in daylight using the ambient light sensor, which the company is positioning as a way to prevent myopia by encouraging more time outdoors.

• Lung Cancer Pill Halves Death Risk: A lung cancer pill might be able to cut the risk of death in half, according to “thrilling” results from a decade-long global study presented at ASCO. All 682 patients included in the trial had a mutation of the EGFR gene (found in about a quarter of global lung cancer cases and up to 40% of cases in Asia), and 88% of patients who took osimertinib once per day after the removal of their tumor were still alive after five years (vs. 78% of the placebo group). Yale researchers who led the study said the results reinforce the need to screen patients for biomarkers such as EGFR mutations at the time of diagnosis.

• AHA Digital Cardiac Rehab Advisory: A science advisory from the American Heart Association laid out how digital technology can help address many of the challenges faced by traditional center-based cardiac rehabilitation. The advisory was put together to guide the development and implementation of digital cardiac rehabilitation interventions, and the end result is one of the best resources available for anyone operating in the space. The AHA dives into the technologies available to support everything from diagnosis to monitoring, as well as how these systems can be merged with clinical data to support fully virtual rehab.

• Axuall Series B: Clinical workforce intelligence startup Axuall raised $20M in Series B funding to expand its data partnership network and accelerate its API integration into credentialing, enrollment, and EHR systems. Axuall operates a national practitioner data network that connects healthcare organizations to insights for network planning and analytics, while also providing digital credentialing services to reduce onboarding and enrollment times.

• Patients Have Scanxiety: Half of patients have “scanxiety” while waiting for results of their medical imaging scans, and 62% feel more informed about their online shopping deliveries than their imaging results. That’s according to a PocketHealth survey of Canadian patients (n=1,542), which also found that 72% of respondents felt they should have access to imaging results at the same time as their doctor, backing up similar results with patients demanding immediate test results in the US.

• Karoo Health’s Cardiac VBC Funding: Value-based cardiac care enablement startup Karoo Health emerged from stealth with $3.4M in seed funding to support its summer 2023 launch in the Southwest US and future expansion. Karoo equips dedicated on-site and virtual care teams with “value-based technology” (online interface, mobile app, telemedicine, wearables) to help cardiology networks, health plans, and health systems transition to outcomes-driven initiatives and contracts.

The New Staffing Landscape With connectRN

Flexibility is a key component of enabling nurses to deliver their best care without getting burned out. In this Digital Health Wire Q&A, we sat down with connectRN CEO Ted Jeanloz to discuss technology’s role in solving healthcare’s staffing challenges and the new ways that human-centered design can help support nurses.

Upgrade Your Prescribing Workflows

Whether you’re a care delivery organization or building products that have prescribers, there’s no need to build your prescribing workflow from scratch. Find out how connecting your prescribers to clinical decision support powered by real-time drug data can help provide the patient-centered insights needed for medication success.

Clinical Documentation Integrity For VBC

The growing use of risk-adjusted reimbursement in outpatient settings means clinical documentation needs to keep up, or health systems risk leaving revenue on the table. Check out Nuance’s new blog to learn how shifting reimbursement models make clinical documentation excellence more important than ever, and how AI can help you achieve it.