Humana’s CEO reiterated the company’s investment in home care Tuesday during an investor conference.
“We are a big believer that home has got an opportunity for a lot of expansion … so we look at the home as being a trajectory of a longer-term opportunity for us,” Bruce Broussard said at the Bank of America Securities 2023 Healthcare Conference in Las Vegas, NV.
Broussard also sees home care as complementary with primary care, both services of which are part of the company’s healthcare arm known as CenterWell.
“We just see it both integration wise and in addition the opportunity for expansion of services,” he said.
There is room for growth in the industry, he noted. Home care needs to evolve from a fee-for-service business to a value-based model, he said Tuesday. Home care provides an avenue for managing care downstream in preventing emergency room visits and hospital admissions and slowing disease progression, he said.
“We just see that opportunity being significant for us in the future,” Broussard said.
Why own assets such as home care provider Kindred at Home and onehome, which offers durable medical equipment and home infusion services?
“It’s really the opportunity to have a platform that’s nationwide and be able to integrate it in with CenterWell assets and then to be able to expand it utilizing a more value-based model going forward,” he said. “There’s a lot of change that needs to happen in the industry. But I think what we’ll see a decade from now in home health will be much different than what we see today.”
CenterWell, which comprises home care, primary care and pharmacy, helped bolster Humana’s strong performance in the first quarter of 2023.
