MN Provider Spins Out Hospital-At-Home Development Company

With assistance from investment firm Flare Capital Partners, Allina Health has spun out Inbound Health, a company that aims to work with providers and payers to develop at-home care programs for patients requiring facility-level acute and post-acute care. 

Allina Health is a nonprofit healthcare system that serves patients in Minnesota and western Wisconsin through 12 hospitals, 14 retail facilities, and over 90 clinics.

The organization has been using the Inbound Health platform since May 2020. The platform includes various resources, including home-based care pathways, virtual care teams, tools to advance engagement, workflow management technologies, and analytics to support hospital-at-home care models.

The Inbound Health platform has been used to care for over 4,200 patients with 185 primary diagnoses thus far. The company provides a wide range of capabilities, such as biometric monitoring, in-home nursing and therapy, and virtual visits, to care for patients. It also leverages artificial intelligence-based models to identify appropriate patients for at-home care.

The use of the company's platform and services has also been shown to lower the total cost of care, according to the press release. As a result, Inbound Health and Allina have developed episode-based payer contracts with several commercial and Medicare Advantage payers in Minnesota. The company plans on replicating this model with payers in new markets.

“The home hospital programs that we’ve scaled to thousands of patients here in Minnesota are rooted in our Population Health drivers of delivering safe, high quality, affordable care that’s timely and convenient to access,” said Lisa Shannon, president and CEO of Allina Health, in a press release. “We are excited for Inbound Health to leverage the capabilities and know-how that power these programs to scale similar at-home programs across the nation.”

Allina Health and Flare Capital led the company's recent $20 million fundraising round. With the funds, Inbound Health intends to expand its proprietary technology platform that integrates with various biometric monitoring devices. It also plans to develop new capabilities that support improved workflow and artificial intelligence-powered analytics.

“Inbound Health will leverage the clinical, operational, and technology assets that we’ve developed alongside Allina Health to enable our customers nationwide to safely offer facility-level care in the home, at a lower cost and with an elevated patient and caregiver experience,” said Dave Kerwar, CEO of Inbound Health, in the press release.

Recently, provider efforts to expand hospital-at-home care have increased.

In October, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Amedisys, and Contessa announced that they would work together to create an at-home care services suite. Through this suite, the organizations aim to deliver recovery, rehabilitation, palliative care, primary care, and home health services.

Another collaboration that took place in August between Sena Health and Salem Medical Center combined technology and provider expertise to create a hospital-at-home program.