What makes the NELC partnership particularly valuable is the level of trust we’ ve built with both providers and patients over decades
_____________________________________________________________________________________ New England Life Care
What makes the NELC partnership particularly valuable is the level of trust we’ ve built with both providers and patients over decades
clinical infrastructure, deep patient relationships, and a coordinated approach that spans infusion, specialty pharmacy, nursing, nutrition, and care management,” Jeni says. Such partnerships are built over time, supported by continuity with both providers and patients.“ What makes the NELC partnership particularly valuable is the level of trust we’ ve built with both providers and patients over decades. Our health system partnerships create strong clinical integration and allow therapies to be delivered within a coordinated continuum of care rather than through fragmented channels,” Jeni adds. Looking ahead, the focus will be on the forces reshaping how infusion care is delivered across the system.“ The next 12 to 18 months will be defined by three pressures converging at once: continued site-of-care migration out of the acute care hospital setting, intensifying financial strain on health systems, and an increasingly active regulatory and reimbursement environment for specialty and infusion therapy,” Catherine says. As those dynamics evolve, the shift toward home and outpatient care continues to gain pace, driven by both system priorities and patient expectations.
“ Site-of-care shifts will accelerate. Payers, CMS, and patients themselves are pushing more infusion and specialty care into the home and outpatient settings,” Catherine says. The shift does more than expand where care happens. It changes what is required of providers operating within it.“ There is real opportunity to expand quality patient-centered infusion access, but only if the providers receiving that volume are clinically capable and aligned with the health systems coordinating the patient’ s care,” she adds.
Financial pressure is reshaping how hospitals evaluate services and partnerships.“ Workforce costs, capacity constraints, and reimbursement compression are pushing health systems to be more deliberate about which services they own, which they partner on, and which they exit,” Catherine says. That pressure is changing the role of external providers. Cooperative models let hospitals maintain governance and clinical oversight without going it alone.“ Cooperative and mission-aligned partnerships will become more valuable because they let hospitals share clinical capability without surrendering control or community accountability,” Catherine says.
For Jeni, the mission behind all of it stays personal.“ Every day I get to work on behalf of patients I will never meet, alongside member hospitals and a team that genuinely believes the cooperative model is a better way to deliver care,” she declares. In a landscape defined by change, that focus continues to shape how NELC connects care delivery to the patients, members and communities it serves. ■
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