Mayo Clinic Platform > Making Cancer Care at Home More Available

Making Cancer Care at Home More Available

By Rich Polikoff Photography by Paul Flessland

Cancer Care Beyond Walls has made life a lot easier for patients with cancer and their families.

However, insurance companies do not typically reimburse for at-home chemotherapy infusion, which means that Mayo Clinic is currently underwriting Cancer Care Beyond Walls’ costs.

Mayo Clinic actively engages in federal advocacy work and payer discussions, explains Rosanna Fahy, Platform’s associate vice president for Cancer Care Beyond Walls.

“Sending a nurse to individual patients’ homes is more expensive than having a nurse in a chemo unit who could treat three or four patients at a time,” Fahy says. “I’m grateful for the institutional funding that has supported the program while the data is gathered to meet the reimbursement challenges.”

Rosanna says it’s not surprising that chemotherapy at patients’ homes, when viewed in isolation, is less cost-efficient than at a single clinical location. It simply costs more to have so many moving pieces — nurses, cars, couriers, chemotherapy solutions — than it is to centralize all operations in a single chemo unit.

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But Mayo Clinic is gathering the data to show a fuller financial picture, which may influence future insurance decisions for at-home chemotherapy. Rosanna says that reimbursement models are not just about the cost of care today — they’re about the cost of each patient’s care over the course of their cancer journey, and how the nature of that care influences outcomes.

“We can predict how many times a patient with cancer is likely to have an emergency department visit for some kind of acute care need,” Rosanna explains. “That's knowable and predictable.

“So, if we can intervene early by managing your care at home and avoid that ED visit, that's where the savings start to come — acute care and emergency episodes are higher cost. Savings are not only about direct costs; they’re also in patients’ time and their comfort at home.”

Collecting data to demonstrate the economic benefits of at-home chemotherapy is just one way Mayo Clinic is working to grow the concept. Other efforts are making a more immediate impact on patients with cancer during their treatment journey.

In 2025, Cancer Care Beyond Walls began in North Dakota, when Altru Health System became the first partner in the Mayo Clinic Care Network to launch the program. Rosanna worked in 2024 to make this expansion possible, alongside Jeremy Jones, M.D., a consultant in the Division of Hematology and Oncology and the medical director of Cancer Care Beyond Walls for Mayo Clinic Platform. Rosanna and Dr. Jones worked closely with Altru, using Platform resources to develop a pragmatic clinical trial.

They both note that there’s a certain symmetry to this. Altru was the first partner to ever join the Mayo Clinic Care Network, Mayo’s community-based rural healthcare delivery system, and now it’s the first organization in the Care Network to join Mayo Clinic in transforming how cancer care is delivered to patients.

“The Platform model is really an enablement model,” Dr. Jones says. “It's less about, ‘Mayo Clinic has to own every single step of the way,’ and more of, ‘Let's show the world how to do things the Mayo Clinic way.’ The beautiful thing about Platform is that we can reach so many more people.”