Falls Church, Virginia-based Inova Health System and Birmingham, Alabama-based ContinuumRX are teaming up.
Together, they have formed a healthcare joint venture aimed at supplying home infusion and specialty pharmacy services to patients in northern Virginia and other nearby areas. Patients will receive services beginning this fall.
This is ContinuumRX’s first relationship with Inova, ContinuumRX CEO Chuck Jett told MedCity in a phone interview.
But it’s far from the company’s first joint venture. The company regularly works with hospitals to improve post-acute care coordination, decrease unneeded readmissions and shorten patients’ length of stay.
Jett said ContinuumRX has operations with seven other health systems, primarily in Alabama and Tennessee. These include Birmingham, Alabama-based Brookwood Baptist Health, Knoxville-based University of Tennessee Medical Center and Chattanooga, Tennesse-based Erlanger Health System.
“Health systems are generally making investments in home health,” Jett said. The primary goal, he said, is “having a good hospital to home transition” and ensuring the “continuity of care.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
In a statement, Inova CMO Dr. Loring Flint agreed. “It is critical for health systems to identify new and innovative ways to deliver the best possible care for the patients they serve both inside and out of the hospital to improve patient satisfaction, outcomes and reduce unnecessary readmissions,” he said.
This agreement alters the landscape for Inova patients and providers.
“The main thing that it does for patients is provide a more efficient discharge process,” Jett said. He added that the JV guarantees patients are getting quality services.
Inova patients “have a more seamless experience in terms of leaving the hospital and continuing therapy in a home setting,” Jett said.
Looking at the provider side, it’s all about simplicity. “It’s really a tighter communication that results from the JV, which makes the physicians’ lives a little easier,” Jett noted. More specifically, he said the integration makes it less of a challenge for physicians to place orders and review lab results and therapies.
Jett expects positive results from the agreement.
Not only does he anticipate it will provide reliable service to patients, but it will also assist Inova in multiple ways. The JV will help the health system improve its discharge efficiency, length of stay statistics and quality metric scores. Through ContinuumRX’s services, hospitals are able to see more information about patients’ therapy compliance.
“We anticipate that we should be servicing a significant portion of all patients leaving the hospital,” Jett said. “We think we’ll achieve that goal.”
Photo: Nasco, Getty Images
