Option Care Health is a U.S. provider of home and alternate-site infusion therapy, delivering medications and clinical support outside traditional hospital settings. It works with hospitals, physicians, health plans and pharmaceutical companies to manage acute and chronic infusion needs. Its services are provided in patients’ homes and through a national network of ambulatory infusion suites.
Option Care Health sits between hospitals, physicians and patients receiving infused therapies. What role does the company play in the wider healthcare system?
Option Care Health is the nation’s largest provider of home and alternate-site infusion therapy. We work closely with hospital systems, physician practices and clinics to identify patients who require infused drugs and infusion services, then help transition them either into the home or into one of our infusion suites across the country.
The largest volumes we support include infectious disease, with antibiotics and antifungals, as well as parenteral and enteral nutrition. We also serve patients with chronic autoimmune, inflammatory and neurological conditions. Many of those patients receive treatment in our infusion suites because they are ambulatory and active in their daily lives, but still require a healthcare professional to administer and oversee their therapy.
How do you determine whether a patient should be treated at home or in an infusion center?
About 70% of our nursing visits currently take place in the home and roughly 30% in infusion suites, although that mix has been moving somewhat toward the clinic setting. We have more than 700 infusion chairs across the country. The home remains particularly important for patients who are mobility-constrained, medically fragile or immunocompromised, provided they are stable enough and the therapy can safely be administered there.
For ambulatory patients, an infusion suite can be a very convenient and safe setting, particularly where advanced practitioners or nurse practitioners are part of the care team. The objective is to match the patient, the therapy and the clinical complexity to the most appropriate setting rather than assume one site of care is right for everyone.
How much more complex care can safely move out of the hospital over the next few years?
We are already seeing higher-acuity patients transition safely and effectively out of hospitals. We work closely with discharge planners, case managers and hospitalists to identify appropriate patients and manage that transition. Across Option Care Health, we have nearly 5,000 clinicians, including nurses, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, pharmacy technicians and dietitians, supporting those decisions and the care that follows.
Our focus is on right-siting care: delivering safe and effective clinical outcomes at a lower total cost. We are also working with pharmaceutical companies as new therapies move through the FDA approval pipeline, particularly products that require greater intensity, monitoring and professional oversight. As monitoring, telehealth and other technologies improve, I expect more therapies to migrate into the home and other lower-cost settings while maintaining high clinical standards.
What does a successful partnership between Option Care Health and a hospital look like in practice?
It begins with identifying patients who are stable enough to be discharged but still require infusion therapy and clinical oversight. We work with thousands of hospitals across the country, and in many cases we embed nurses within those facilities as care-transition specialists. They work directly with hospital teams to move patients safely and efficiently from inpatient care onto our services.
That partnership also continues after discharge. We provide feedback on how the patient is responding and the outcomes we are seeing. For hospitals, that can help free beds for patients who genuinely need inpatient care and manage length of stay more effectively, particularly where they are operating under capitated payments or diagnosis-related group arrangements.
How are payer site-of-care policies reshaping infusion care, and where does the cost-quality equation come into play?
We believe we are on the right side of the cost-quality equation. We have deep relationships with health plans and payers to identify opportunities to reduce costs while helping patients receive high-quality care in the right setting. At the same time, we work closely with hospitals to identify patients who can transition safely out of inpatient care.
The important point is that cost and quality should not be treated as opposing goals. The right site of care can reduce total cost while maintaining or improving outcomes. [As more decisions around site of care move toward the consumer, patients will also need clearer information about the choices available to them and the trade-offs between cost and convenience.]
As rare-disease, neurological and other advanced therapies become more complex, what capabilities does Option Care Health need to build?
We continue to invest heavily in training and development. A major part of our value proposition to our team members is helping them grow their capabilities as new products come to market. We work upstream with pharmaceutical companies as therapies move through the approval process, then develop clinical protocols and train our teams around how those products should be administered and what they should expect.
Data is increasingly important as well. We capture information around infusion events and clinical outcomes, both to support prescribing physicians and to provide insights back to pharmaceutical companies. The combination of clinical protocols, professional training and better data allows us to prepare for therapies that are increasingly specialized and complex.
What is the biggest constraint on expanding home and ambulatory infusion further?
Capacity. Across healthcare, the greatest challenge is having enough highly qualified clinicians. Nurses are at the center of our care model: they oversee the infusion, assess how the patient is responding, educate the patient, capture clinical information and communicate that back to the prescribing physician. They are effectively an extension of the physician’s practice into the home or infusion suite.
We have around 8,000 team members nationally and have built additional nursing capacity through Naven Health, alongside our pharmacy infrastructure. But demand continues to rise as the population ages and therapies become more complex. The ability to recruit, retain and develop excellent nurses, pharmacists, dietitians and other clinicians will determine how quickly this model can grow. Technology can help, but ultimately the service depends on having great people in place.
