‘it Just Made Home Care A Major Player’: A Place At Home Joins Guide Model

A Place At Home has joined the ranks of a cohort of home care companies that care for individuals with dementia as GUIDE Model participants. The home care provider has already received encouraging patient feedback – and it sees the model not only as a way to enhance care but also as a promising new referral pipeline.

Many home care companies participate in the GUIDE model through their partnerships with Medicare Part B-enrolled providers or suppliers approved by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Similar to Right at Home, A Place At Home recently partnered with virtual nursing startup PocketRN to improve outcomes and prevention.

“Preventing readmissions, preventing initial hospitalizations and improving quality of life — those are big metrics that they’re going to be shooting for,” Dustin Distefano, co-founder and CEO of A Place At Home, told Home Health Care News. “What we’re going to be doing is tracking our readmissions, we also track change of care, so that we can catch things before they escalate. We’re aiming to improve outcomes, reduce readmission and add a valuable source to those families.”

A Place At Home is a franchise company that offers in-home care, care coordination and more. The company has roughly 60 locations.

As part of the partnership, A Place At Home franchises help deliver in-home respite care for families enrolled in GUIDE through PocketRN.

A Place At Home’s various franchise locations will refer Medicare Parts A and B dementia patients to PocketRN. PockenRN then performs a comprehensive assessment, and A Place At Home conducts a home safety evaluation before initiating care.

Though it’s early in the partnership, A Place At Home has already received positive feedback, and the model has become a potential referral source.

“Thus far, we’ve seen a pretty big impact on the families, and they really enjoy having [in-home respite care] available,” Distefano said. “The other thing is, having access to this opens their mind to home care. I know home care is a huge industry, but a lot of people don’t know that these services are available.”

A Place At Home’s participation in GUIDE also allows the company to reach individuals who need care but may not be able to afford the costs associated with private pay services, according to Distefano.

“It gives us an opportunity to say, ‘Actually, if you have anybody who is in your community, or anybody being discharged that has a dementia diagnosis and has a Medicare Part A and Part B, have them give us a call, because we can enroll in the GUIDE program and get them at least 20 visits a year’”, he said. “That gives us an opportunity to essentially bypass that objection that nobody can pay for your service, and give them a resource now.”

Ultimately, Distefano said he believes that the GUIDE Model will demonstrate to Medicare the full breadth of the home care capabilities.

“We’ve come a long way since 15 years ago, but it’s still not there on the Medicare side,” he said. “The home care industry as a whole, the private caregiver industry, has always been known as sitters, or kind of companions, so Medicare has never really looked at reimbursing. Today, that door is open. It just made home care a major player.”

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