Luna Announces Major Health System Collaborations in San Diego and Atlanta

The status quo in physical therapy isn’t working for anyone — for therapists, for health systems, and certainly not for patients. In the current system, patients are forced to wait 26 days before starting their care, 70 percent never complete their full treatment plan, and 63 percent prefer an alternative model of delivery: at-home care. At Luna, we’ve found great success delivering on-demand, outpatient physical therapy services to patients in the comfort of their homes. 

With recent partnerships with some of the top health systems in the United States, it’s an exciting time of growth at Luna. By the end of March, we will now deliver care to patients in 25 of the largest metros across 15 states — and the number continues to rise. In the past week alone, we’ve announced collaborations with Emory Healthcare in Atlanta and Scripps Health in San Diego. This follows our recent expansions into Ohio (Cleveland and Columbus) and North Carolina (Charlotte and Raleigh). 

The collaboration announced today with Emory Healthcare, the most comprehensive academic health system in Georgia, expands its rehabilitation services to patients. Through Luna, patients can now receive on-demand, in-home physical therapy as an alternative to visiting an outpatient clinic, saving them time, energy, and resources. 

According to Scott D. Boden, director of the Emory Orthopaedics & Spine Center and vice president for business innovation at Emory Healthcare, Luna will bring “safe, convenient, and high-quality care” to the system’s patients. Our services will better serve patients by “removing the barriers of travel time and transportation and making it as easy as possible to complete their treatment plan.” By removing these barriers, Luna helps patients achieve better health outcomes, while allowing health systems to keep patients within their system and expand their geographical footprint. 

We also recently announced a collaboration with Scripps Health, the top-ranked health system in San Diego, to deliver on-demand physical therapy to patients in the area. Both Scripps and Emory Healthcare will use Luna’s best-in-class technology platform and broad network of exceptional therapists to seamlessly match patients seeking care based on specialty, geography, schedules, and other factors. When patients request at-home care, a physical therapist will visit them at a time of their choosing.

Luna therapists provide high quality care equivalent to what might be provided in a traditional clinic setting. They are able to evaluate each patient and create a unique care plan based on their needs and goals, and patients see the same physical therapist for each visit. Between visits, patients and therapists will use the Luna platform throughout the treatment process to communicate between appointments, perform therapist prescribed exercises, and track overall recovery. 

Our expansion into new markets comes as the need for at-home care delivery has skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. While it did not create the need for at-home care, it has opened the eyes of many patients to the benefits of at-home care, and those preferences are likely to endure beyond the pandemic. As those new preferences take hold, health systems and PT providers will need to keep up and find new ways to deliver care beyond the four walls of the clinic. Patients and health systems alike understand that the current model isn’t working, and at-home services are more convenient, lead to better health outcomes, and cut costs. 

These two new collaborations come as more and more health systems are seeing delivery as a way to boost revenue in physical therapy, an area of care that is run inefficiently and often at a loss. By partnering with Luna to provide delivery, health systems are able to expand their reach and access without building more physical centers. As of now, nearly half of patients referred to physical therapy by a system end up seeing a competitor. Expanding a system’s reach can help dramatically reduce that number, keeping patients in-network.

There is strong evidence that health systems are seeing these benefits. With these recent expansions, Luna works with health systems and physical therapy groups to provide at-home care via in-person delivery in 25 markets and 15 states across the country, including Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas, and Washington State. The need for on-demand, outpatient physical therapy exists across the country, and we look forward to continuing our expansion into new markets to provide our services to any patient who needs it.