The home-based care provider Resilient Healthcare has partnered with the Dallas-based White Rock Medical Center (WRMC) on transitional care and hospital-at-home programs.

Resilient – which has high-acuity patient population focus – pitched its capabilities originally to Pipeline Health, WRMC’s parent company. Pipeline owns six additional hospital systems in the U.S., meaning this could be the start of something much bigger for Resilient.

One of the programs the two are partnering on will be a part of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver, and the other will not be. Resilient – a pioneer in the high-acuity care in the home space – sets up their partnerships so that success is not contingent on the public health emergency and CMS’ waiver.

“We are starting with a transitional care, outpatient type model,” Resilient CEO and founder Jackleen Samuel told Home Health Care News. “We already started last week with therapy in the home. And then we’re adding on virtual care, as well as physician and mid-level care in the patient’s home. And then we’ll provide under the Acute Hospital Care at Home program after we finish our Medicare waivers.”

The Plano, Texas-based Resilient Healthcare has an AI-based platform that enables hospital-level care in the home. It also provides SNF-at-home services, as well as traditional home health services. The company has 21 hospital partners at this point, and also works with other home-based care organizations on a consultant basis to help launch high-acuity care in the home capabilities. 

Resilient’s staff consists of PTs, OTs, speech therapists and dietary specialists, among other professionals.

On its end, WRMC has undergone significant ownership change over recent years. Now that its found its footing, providing more community-based care seemed like a logical next step, WRMC COO Shawn Lovelady told HHCN.

“Pipeline’s view of this hospital was a strong community hospital, and that has always been our strategy: to provide services not just within the walls of the hospital, but also outside the walls of the hospital,” Lovelady said. “So our strategy around engaging with the community has always been there and has not changed. But going forward, the pandemic has created the opportunity and avenues to engage with people in a virtual setting and in the home setting.”

WRMC wants to provide more care in the home for all the obvious reasons: it’s safe, it’s cost effective and the patients prefer it to a hospital setting.

But it will also allow WRMC to flex its value-based muscles more moving forward, Lovelady said.

“It also provides us an opportunity as we continue to move towards value-based contracting in arrangements with not only government entities, but also commercial payers,” he said. “To do things differently and effectively that are good for the patient, but also good financially for all parties involved.”

The partnership with Resilient lays the groundwork for what WRMC wants to do next, which is adding more and more care capabilities to its package – inside the home or otherwise.

Dealing with a hospital that is heads down on innovation makes things easier, Samuel said. In fact, she called WRMC one of the best health systems Resilient has worked with to date.

On the other side, Resilient’s tech-enabled platform gives WRMC and its other hospital partners more room to grow, both far into the future and outside of any one payment structure.

“Pipeline in itself is very driven on innovation,” Samuel said. “They’ve done a good job of innovating that hospital system and adding new verticals. The plan here is to get everything launched in Dallas – since it’s in our backyard – and kind of learn how each other work, and then move into the other hospitals that Pipeline has and start launching these programs for their other hospitals.”

WRMC and Resilient have worked on getting things up and running together, and patients are already being treated in their shared programs.

As for the future, WRMC wants to have a more significant patient census being treated in the home in the near term.

“We’re starting small, but our goal is to continue to grow from a volume perspective over the next year,” Lovelady said. “Our goal would be to try to serve hundreds of patients per month under the current model.”