DispatchHealth has formed a new partnership with Emory Healthcare in Atlanta to offer Emory patients follow-up and high-acuity medical care in the home.

As DispatchHealth’s service capabilities and reach continue to grow, the leadership team remains focused on meeting individuals with high medical and social needs where they are.

Simultaneously, health systems are looking for ways to keep these patients healthy and out of the hospital.

“The forward-thinking health care organizations will need an at-home care strategy to ease access burdens for patients so that patients that need care, receive care,” Will ElLaissi, managing director of innovation at Emory Healthcare, said in an email. “Emory Healthcare has long been a prominent health care brand locally, regionally and nationally, so our focus is on finding ways to increase opportunities for patients to access care. Partnering with Dispatch Health …, was an opportunity we were excited to move forward with.”

For DispatchHealth, partnering with health systems gives them credibility and more markets to enter into.

“What we’re trying to do is become an indispensable part of the health care ecosystem,” Dispatch CEO and co-founder Mark Prather told Home Health Care News. “We really provide a service that very few others do and we live in that gray space right between the building and the home, and there are certain patients that we’re probably the more appropriate solution for.”

The Denver-based DispatchHealth is an in-home medical care provider that serves over 50 markets across the U.S. The company has raised over $700 million in funding to date.

The partnership will allow Emory patients to request DispatchHealth for services and assistance with viral infections, COPD exacerbations, congestive heart failure and other ailments.

DispatchHealth will also supplement Emory’s efforts to provide timely care after a patient’s ER visit with its own ED to Home program.

That aspect of the partnership is key, ElLaissi said.

“This also allows us to reduce the length of time a patient is staying in a hospital when lower-touch, lower-cost settings would provide just as much utility,” he said. “There have also been patients that may get admitted to the floor of the hospital for additional monitoring from the ED due to the lack of faith that appropriate services would be provided to the patient if they left the ED.”

Patients who are identified as being at high risk for hospital readmission will have access to DispatchHealth’s Bridge Care program, which includes proactive in-home care within 48 hours post-discharge from a hospital stay.

The partnership between Emory Healthcare and DispatchHealth is yet another example of two entities realizing that instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, teaming up gives patients the best of both worlds.

“There may be some folks who say, ‘I’d like to do it myself,’ but the way we do it is very integrated,” Prather said. “We like it to look like an extension of our partner, so it feels like Emory is the one coming into the home.”