Shifting the Conversation on Health System Infusion from Challenges to Opportunities

The shift towards community-based care, driven in part by patient preferences and reimbursement mandates, has created a multi-billion-dollar private infusion services industry over the past several years. This move has put increasing pressure on health systems to adapt and innovate in order to retain patients and revenue alike. We sat down with our own Prateek Bhatia, VP/GM, Intrafusion at McKesson, to get his insights on the current considerations, challenges, and opportunities for infusion in health systems. A few highlights from our interview included:

McKesson Health Systems Editorial Team (MHS): We often speak about the outmigration of infusion patients from the hospital. From your perspectives, what’s the single most influential force or variable driving the shift away from hospital-based infusion care?

Prateek Bhatia (PB): When you ask me the single most important or biggest driver of what’s causing this movement of infusion services from the inpatient hospital setting to outpatient or in the community – it’s honestly, in my opinion, patient preference. If you look at what's happened in the industry over the last five years or so, while the payers have strategically tried to move infusion volume from inpatient to lower cost of care settings in the community, the advent of ambulatory infusion centers (AICs) has really incentivized patients with two or three main things:

There’s the access to care – often it’s very difficult for patients to go to a hospital to get infusion versus when you compare getting infusion services in the community closer to their houses. It's really more convenient for patients. Secondly, there’s the overall patient experience. In this digital age, many of these infusion suites in the community now have great patient-facing applications and portals. Also, when patients come into these infusion suites they get almost VIP-level service. They have private infusion suites. Patients can come in very quickly, complete a 5-minute registration, enjoy a nice waiting area with snack, drinks, things like that – these are things that are important for patients.

MHS: Without necessarily putting a number on it, what kind of weight would you put on the risk or the missed opportunities of infusion patient leakage?

PB: What we are seeing is one in about every three patients, or almost 30-40% of patients, start looking for more convenient options once they begin their treatment within the hospital. What we see is when a patient is diagnosed with a new disease and prescribed infusion therapy, they often start infusion treatments within the hospital or a clinic associated with the hospital, but very quickly they start finding more convenient options. And what starts happening is – as you asked for the downstream impact of this leakage for the health system, if you will – could look like this:

When these patients leave their initial provider’s care and start getting infusions elsewhere, then if there are any complications with the patient, the medical record doesn't go back to the health system. Often the physician which started the treatment has no idea what complexities happened, any side effects they may be experiencing, whether they need to increase or decrease the dose, how the disease may have escalated, and so forth. So that's from a patient clinical perspective. But when I think about for health systems’ overarching revenue implications as well, health systems not only start losing that patient's clinical insight, but they also start losing the revenue associated with a given patient. Often these patients need other services along with their infusion – like imaging or lab. Again, both from an economical as well as a clinical continuity of care standpoint, I think the health system and the treating physician loses those insights, which I think are very critical in ensuring the patients keep getting great care.

“There are boundless opportunities for a given health system to solve for these challenges and ensure the patient gets excellent care under the guidance of the treating provider when they understand how significant the opportunity is and when they have the right strategic partner.” – Prateek Bhatia, VP/GM, Intrafusion at McKesson

Listen to the full podcast in the video above, and download our exclusive Insider’s First Look at Specialty and Infusion for Health Systems by McKesson for a more in-depth guide on how partnering with our experts to modernize your infusion strategy can help you achieve more.

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