Humana Execs Highlight Kindred at Home in Earnings Call

Strange Tony,

Humana held its Q4 and FY2018 earnings call today.  CEO Bruce Broussard mentioned Kindred at Home several times in his presentation to Wall Street analysts.

"Regarding the home, we established an independent home health company joining Kindred at Home and Curo that provides significant overlap with our Medicare Advantage business."

"We are now implementing care and payment models oriented to patients with multiple chronic conditions in five pilot markets. We've optimized our ability to exchange key medical history with Kindred at Home. We use this information during the home health admission process to inform the patient's treatment plan as we deploy evidence-based, disease-specific care plans to identify and prioritize the most impactful clinical interventions."

"Additionally, Kindred at Home has selected Homecare Homebase as the electronic medical record and practice management system for both home health and hospice. And we’ll begin implementing this system in 2019. This will accelerate our ability to proactively identify key clinical interventions while improving revenue capture and business and quality reporting."

His statements show how Humana is turning our hospice into a home health agency.  Homecare Homebase for hospice is "garbage in-garbage out" according to our nurses.  I'm not sure what Humana's analytics can do with an off target clinical system.  

CEO Broussard believes home health and hospice are interchangeable.  I'd heard talk of Sales being combined, that marketers would push both home health and hospice.  Gentiva tried that under its OneGentiva initiative and it turned out poorly.

Humana CFO Brian Kane, formerly of Goldman Sachs, also spoke about Kindred at Home.

As noted previously, we made investments in the home, completing the acquisition of a 40% stake in the country's largest home health and hospice operator, Kindred at Home with an option to acquire a 100% of the business in the next few years.

Recall that as a 40% owner in a highly leveraged business in Kindred, there's a lot of debt impacts there that get consolidated below the EBITDA line.

Humana and its financial rapscallion partners made Kindred at Home highly leveraged.  Broussard, Kane and the Humana board crafted the deal that places our hospice in financial jeopardy should reimbursement shift dramatically lower or utilization decline..

An important element of Healthcare Services also is Kindred, and it's important that we invest in Kindred for the long term. And so for example, implementing Homecare Homebase, while an expense for 2019, it's a decision that the Kindred board made recently because we thought it would position us better for the future and enable us, as Humana, to attain the clinical outcomes and the clinical measures that we're striving to do.  So we thought that was a smart investment to make.

The "Kindred board" is now made of leaders from Humana, WCAS, TPG Capital, Gentiva and Curo Health Services.  They foisted HomeCare Homebase on us for Humana's needs, not our patients.

In addition, Kindred at Home incurred higher-than-anticipated cost in the quarter, including investments related to enhancing the capabilities of existing branches that present a substantial opportunity to service Humana membership, costs resulting from the shutdown of unprofitable branches and other costs incurred to establish an independent company.

Our adjusted EBITDA guidance for 2019 also reflects the cost of additional investments that Kindred at Home is making to enhance the clinical model in preparation for the patient-driven groupings model or PDGM including the implementation of the Homebase Homecare system across both the home and hospice platforms that Bruce discussed in his remarks.

This is the most information I've received on our company's strategy to break our hospice and turn it into Humana home health.  Frankly, I am glad to learn it.   There are other hospices in town.  We used to be head and shoulders above them.

One nurse said last week.  "I don't want to work for another hospice, but they've turned us into another hospice."  Yes they have.

Anonymous