The model provides residents with onsite, comprehensive therapy, medical care, pharmacy, and lab services. Key components to the program include a care navigator who coordinates the residents’ total care and high-tech/high-touch communications that transfer the resident’s information to ancillary and acute care services through an electronic health record.
Although Juniper Communities’ residents were older and more cognitively impaired than the overall Medicare population with similar conditions, independent researchers from Anne Tumlinson Innovations looked at 2012 Medicare Beneficiaries Survey, as well as those living in senior housing that didn’t provide an integrated healthcare program, and found Juniper's Connect4Life program had:
50% lower inpatient hospitalization rates
80% lower readmission rates
15% lower rate of emergency department use
“The results show when you provide supportive housing and services and integrate with clinical care services you can avoid high utilization of the highest cost services,” said Katzmann, noting that it has the potential to address population health among the 5% who use 50% of healthcare resources.