Insights

With a 300% increase in the past 10 years, the infusion therapy marketplace continues to expand and is expected to experience continued dramatic growth for years to come. The enduring burden of chronic diseases, the rising number and costs of specialty infusion drugs, the promotion of home-based care, and the ongoing pressure to simultaneously decrease costs are all key factors in market growth.

With these challenges, there has been a great opportunity for the growth of home infusion and ambulatory infusion sites as part of broader health system infusion strategies, all of which can help deliver exceptional patient care while driving substantial financial gains for your health system.

Here’s a closer look at the benefits of establishing your own home infusion therapy program and how to begin doing so.

Why Home Infusion?

Originally, home infusion helped patients transition from the hospital setting and into a location where they can heal on their own terms to receive therapies for antibiotics, hydration, and parenteral nutrition. With expansion of services, home infusion has also helped health systems to reduce length of stay and overall cost, while effectively managing transitions of care for complex patients. Patients have also become more comfortable with home care recently due to the global pandemic.

More recently, many insurance companies have begun to preferentially require infusions for high-dollar medications to be provided in non-hospital-based locations, such as the home or an ambulatory infusion suite through site-of-care policies. Alternatively, hospitals may be required to administer medications received via a white-bag process from an external specialty pharmacy.

Home Infusion vs. Hospital-Based Infusion

Many health systems today have limited infusion options for patients, outside of hospital infusion clinics. This can lead to a lack of structure and options as far as where to send patients with new insurance company policies. With this historical infusion structure and rapidly evolving payer policies, many patients are sent to external pharmacies outside the health system, or significant clinician time is spent to obtain insurance overrides. This leads to a loss of revenue, a decline in patient experience, and additional operational challenges for clinic staff and prior authorization teams.

Health systems and the patients they serve benefit the most when infusion services are provided and managed by the health system – not by an outside organization who reaps the financial benefits that belong to the health system.

Standing up your own home infusion therapy program provides:

• Access, convenience, and quality patient care
• Immediate and new revenue sources for future growth
• Decreased revenue leakage risk
• Financial and operational attainability by nearly all health systems
• Minimal barriers to entry

Contrary to what many pharmacy leaders believe, establishing a well-designed infusion services program and making it operational in less than six months is a realistic and very achievable goal – and Visante can help.

Start Building Your Own Home Infusion Therapy Program with Visante

Visante is here to help you begin building a home infusion program tailored to the unique needs of your health system. Our team of consultants begins by conducting a thorough assessment, creating a detailed business plan, and helping you build a well-constructed home infusion site-of-care strategy that begins delivering positive ROI quickly while setting you up for a sustainable, profitable program.

Unlike firms that outsource infusion services and reap the financial benefits for themselves, Visante is firmly committed to helping you stand up your own infusion site-of-care strategy. We are firm believers that your infusion services program should serve you, your providers, and your patients well in the long term. Our approach ensures patient care benefits, significant cost reductions, and access to a strong revenue stream stay within your health system to strengthen your organization today and for years to come.

Contact us today to learn more about a system infusion assessment, site-of-care and white-bagging challenges, or about building your own home infusion therapy program.