Home Healthcare News Capital + Strategy Conference - Startups Breaking into the Home
After two years of virtual conferences and events, the Sprinter Health team recently had the opportunity to attend the Home Healthcare News Capital+Strategy conference. Our VP of Partnerships, Nick Kirby, was part of a panel entitled, “How Start-ups are Breaking into the Home.”
During the panel discussion, Nick outlined how Sprinter Health supports our partners’ staffing shortages. At the organizations with whom we partner, staffing shortages often mean that highly-qualified personnel are spending their time on lower acuity procedures, which means less time on more complex services. For example, they are doing vitals checks or handling specimen logistics when they could be spending their time doing more critical work with patient care. By partnering with Sprinter Health and relying on our mobile W-2 clinicians (“Sprinters”) for lab draws, vitals checks, and more, healthcare organizations can augment their workforce and free up their own staff to focus on other areas of need.
Sharing the stage with Sprinter Health was Bryant Hudson, VP of Business Development at MedArrive. Like Sprinter Health, MedArrive is a start-up that sends providers – in MedArrive’s case, recently retired paramedics – into the home. It was interesting to hear about their work and how they, like Sprinter Health, are helping partners succeed despite the rampant staffing shortages in healthcare.
Another highlight of the event was hearing Dr. Meena Seshamani’s opening remarks. Dr. Seshamani is the deputy administrator and director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. She is a physician and a trained economist, with a PhD in Economics from Oxford. She emphasized the importance of innovation when it comes to value-based care and holistic, patient-centered models but stressed that these must always be evaluated based on three criteria:
1) Do they address healthcare disparities and inequities?
2) Do they improve quality of care and outcomes?
3) Is the approach sustainable and affordable?
Those are some of the same criteria by which we evaluate our work at Sprinter Health. We know we improve outcomes because without us, many people would skip the lab tests that would allow for timely diagnosis and treatment. As for addressing inequities, we know that the logistics of getting to a lab for a blood draw can be a barrier to accessing healthcare. What if you are home-bound, don’t have adequate transport, or can’t afford the down time from work? That’s a barrier we are already addressing today. Someday, we’d love to make a dent in improving access in rural communities too. And as for affordability and sustainability, that has been our priority from day one. We will continue to iterate and adjust to ensure we achieve that goal. We need to find a way to make these critical services sustainable and affordable for the benefit of everyone in the healthcare ecosystem but especially patients.
Hearing from industry leaders at the conference made the Sprinter Health team optimistic about the future of healthcare. As an industry, we are more focused than ever on improving the patient experience and removing barriers to healthcare. The adoption of telehealth services during the pandemic has opened up new models for delivering care. And despite the challenges of hiring healthcare professionals during these trying times, there are innovators combining new staffing models and technologies to extend the reach and augment the staff of healthcare providers and systems. This is a great time to work in healthcare and knock down barriers to care.
You can read more about the panel discussion in this Home Health Care News article.
