Jefferson Health, BAYADA to Establish Home Health Joint Venture

Jefferson Health is partnering with BAYADA Home Health Care to launch a joint venture focused on providing care in patients' homes.

Called Jefferson Health at Home, the joint venture will leverage both in-person and virtual care drawing from the home health and hospice services at Jefferson Health New Jersey and Abington Jefferson Health in Pennsylvania, as well as BAYADA's scale and management systems that will be used to oversee the joint venture's operations.

"The pandemic heightened demand for hospital services delivered at home," said Dr. Bruce A. Meyer, president of Jefferson Health, in a news release. "Jefferson extended infusion services and remote oxygen monitoring into the homes of thousands of our patients while seeing tens of thousands of patients through our telehealth service. Now, with BAYADA and Jefferson aligned, we're able to leverage their best post-acute-care practices across an expanded geographic footprint while lowering the total cost of care without compromising access or quality."

The joint venture will be available to Jefferson patients across Bucks, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties in Pennsylvania as well as Camden, Burlington and Gloucester counties in New Jersey.

The definitive agreement to create the joint venture is expected to be finalized by spring 2022.

"BAYADA's management, operational and clinical expertise, paired with Jefferson Health's clinical vision and commitment to innovation, will continue to transform healthcare in the Philadelphia region, and we will use this platform to launch bold and innovative digital healthcare experiences at home — where people want to be most," said David Baiada, CEO of BAYADA Home Health Care, in a news release.

Further, the agreement includes an academic affiliation through which students at Jefferson, particularly those at Jefferson College of Nursing, will get new training opportunities.

The news of the joint venture comes just one week after Penn State Health announced a partnership with Highmark Health and Contessa to launch a home health-focused joint venture of its own that will provide acute care and recovery services.

Provider interest in home healthcare services is rising, spurred by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Just last month, prominent health systems, like Mayo Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, Geisinger Health System and Johns Hopkins Medicine, launched a coalition to advocate for strategies that support the delivery of hospital-level care at home.

The government is also backing the push toward home healthcare. In 2020, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services launched the Acute Hospital Care at Home program, which allows participating hospitals to treat certain acute care patients at home using telehealth and remote patient monitoring. As of Nov. 15, 83 health systems, comprising 187 hospitals in 34 states, are approved to participate in the program.

In addition, the option to receive care at home is popular among healthcare consumers. About 65 percent of 2,070 U.S. adults said they would have considered home healthcare as an alternative to a hospital in the past if they had known it was an option, according to a survey commissioned by Interim HealthCare and conducted in September.