Health IT

Mayo Clinic forms joint venture with Select Medical to focus on improving rural care

While Mayo Clinic appears to have beaten a retreat in expanding its presence in urban areas, the same is not true for less populous regions of the country. The venerable healthcare institution announced Wednesday that it has formed a joint venture with Select Medical called Allevant Solutions that will focus on improving post-acute care in rural […]

By Arundhati Parmar on January 09, 2013

While Mayo Clinic appears to have beaten a retreat in expanding its presence in urban areas, the same is not true for less populous regions of the country.

The venerable healthcare institution announced Wednesday that it has formed a joint venture with Select Medical called Allevant Solutions that will focus on improving post-acute care in rural America. More specifically Allevant Solutions will offer consulting services that include methodologies, algorithms and processes based upon clinical services, business expertise and quality improvement jointly developed by Mayo and Select Medical to rural hospitals and skilled nursing homes.

Select Medical specializes in acute care rehabilitation.

There is a gap in care for rural patients who leave tertiary acute care but still need high-quality post-acute medical care. That is where Allevant fits in. The joint venture’s model is based on a transitional care and ventilator program started by pulmonologist Mark Lindsay.

“Skilled nursing facilities and rural hospitals are rarely equipped with the resources needed to provide optimal post-acute care for ventilator-dependent or other complex patients,” said Dr. Lindsay. “As a result, medically complex patients in many rural areas have to either settle for less-than-ideal settings or travel great distances. To address this, we chose to work with Select Medical because of its complementary expertise in post-acute care and its built-in, national network of long-term acute care hospitals.

One of the primary goals of the joint venture is to assist rural hospitals and skilled nursing homes so that they are not forced to close, thereby remaining a viable source of employment for rural healthcare jobs.

The details of the terms of the joint venture were not disclosed other than to note that Mayo Clinic and Lindsay have a financial interest in the technologies that will be leveraged by the joint venture.