Healthcare-at-home specialist Amedisys announced the acquisition of Contessa Health, a provider of hospital-at-home and skilled nursing facility (SNF) at-home services. Upon closing of the deal, Contessa will operate as a wholly owned division of Amedisys.

Contessa’s business and proprietary informatics platform, Care Convergence, offers risk-based-model and claims analytics capabilities.

The company partners with health systems and health plans across the country, including Mount Sinai Health System, CommonSpirit Health and Highmark Health, to offer patients acute and post-acute care at home.

Amedisys chairman and CEO Paul Kusserow told MobiHealthNews that Contessa’s tech-enabled, home-based care-delivery platform will help the company expand their capabilities well beyond traditional home health and hospice.

Care Convergence consists of three main core competencies, including a care-management platform for coordinating patient care across teams, patient-data collection and analytics, and a revenue cycle and insurance claims management system.

“By adding Contessa to our family, Amedisys adds higher acuity clinical services, analytics, claims processing, and network management capabilities,” he said.

Kusserow explained these capabilities are essential to price and manage risk-based reimbursement models.

Care Convergence also supports the development of customized care plans and coordination with vendors like medical equipment providers, lab technologists and staff orchestrating follow-up appointments.

“Most importantly, Contessa’s delivery platform has proven to achieve tremendous patient outcomes while managing the total cost of care across these patient populations,” he said. “This differentiates Amedisys as the first national home health provider to move into the tech-enabled, hospital at home and SNF at Home space in a meaningful way, with the ability to scale across a large geographic footprint.”

He explained that, by adding Hospital-at-Home and SNF-at-Home, Amedisys can take care of higher-acuity patients in the home setting and it grows their total addressable market from about $44 billion to $73 billion.

A company release claimed the acquisition sets up Amedisys for a potential partnership expansion with more than a hundred hospitals across an additional 28 states.

“Also, the Medicare Advantage population is growing at a rate seven times faster than traditional Medicare fee-for-service population,” Kusserow noted.

Over the past few years, the rapid pace of technological innovations has given patients countless more opportunities to have nearly on-demand care delivered wherever they prefer, while the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated patient demand for remaining in the home.

Meanwhile, advances in at-home and tech-enabled care have fueled this transformation as the pandemic has rapidly spurred new rounds of healthcare policy, creating new opportunities for reimbursing at-home care.

Kusserow said Amedisys would continue to invest in the Contessa platform to further build out in-home service offerings such as palliative care and primary care.

“We will also continue to seek and incorporate additional technologies or capabilities to best care for more patients or coordinate across silos which exist in the current healthcare ecosystem,” he said.