Medibank invests in home-based hip rehab

Medibank is beefing up its push for more home care with a $4 million investment in knee and hip rehabilitation.

Medibank executive Andrew Wilson. Picture: Julian Andrews.

Health insurance giant Medibank is beefing up its push for more home care with a $4 million investment in knee and hip rehabilitation, to shift patients out of the expensive hospital setting.

Andrew Wilson, Medibank’s group executive of healthcare and strategy, said the insurer wanted to provide more healthcare choices for its customers, no matter what their needs were.

“If you look around the world, more and more care is being delivered in the home,” he said.

The Medibank executive added that one of the insurer’s key strategic pillars was to promote choice.

“We want to provide demonstrable evidence that our members can get care where they want it, not just where it is currently available, and that will inevitably lead to more treatment at home,” Mr Wilson said.

“We are already doing that with members that have complex chronic conditions by providing programs that keep them out of hospital and at home. The in-home rehabilitation initiative is another angle on that.”

Medibank recently acquired HealthStrong, Australia’s largest provider of allied health services to residents of aged-care facilities and in the home, to strengthen its ability to provide care to its members at a time and location that was convenient to them.

HealthStrong was not a large acquisition for Medibank but it was strategically important as the insurer has been preparing for a future where the growth of healthcare is in mobile services — providing care where people want it. Mr Wilson said Medibank was trying to make the health system more contemporary, with best practice.

Medibank funds about 13,500 hip and knee replacements each year, and of those that need rehabilitation, the insurer believes up to 20 per cent could initially benefit from home-based therapy as it rolls out its new rehabilitation initiative.

The move, which has been trialled in Victoria, will be rolled out nationally today, with Medibank partnering with qualified and experienced health professionals to deliver the in-home rehabilitation service for patients following hip or knee replacement surgery.

“The key thing here is, the choice element has two components: the patient and the doctor,” Mr Wilson said.

“We are not saying home-based rehabilitation is for everybody. It needs to be given the tick from the patients’ treating doctor.”

Mr Wilson highlighted that Australia was underweight in home-base care, a sentiment recently backed by Michael Wooldridge, who served as health minister in the Howard government. He argued at an industry function that one of the biggest problems with Australia’s healthcare system was the “ridiculous” demarcation of “in-hospital and out-of-hospital” care. He argued that other countries were moving away from hospital care, while Australia was building more hospitals.

Mr Wilson said that health insurers had probably been remiss in the past by not putting in place systems that allowed alternatives to be developed.

“We have made a decision to invest in that, and for the right people it is going to be a great option,” he said.

The head of healthcare and strategy added that Medibank would eventually add to its services in the home, including palliative care and chemotherapy. “Palliative care is an important area where we know the vast majority of people want to die at home but the vast majority die in a hospital,” he said.

“It’s another area where the industry can take a lead and build alternative pathways.”