Medical respite programs provide care for people experiencing homelessness after a hospital discharge. Safety Net Connect, a provider of virtual care solutions, and the National Institute for Medical Respite Care (NIMRC), a special program of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council (NHCHC), are expanding their Recup Connect pilot program to four Los Angeles-based CommonSpirit Health hospitals.
In a recent interview, Keith Matsutsuyu, CEO and co-founder of Safety Net Connect, described the pilot’s potential.
The pilot was designed to improve hospital discharge coordination by connecting acute care hospitals with recuperative care providers across LA County.
Launched in January 2025, the pilot uses Safety Net Connect’s Recup Connect platform to enable electronic referrals along with a dashboard view of the recuperative care facility’s bed availability, acuity capability and other factors. The company says the holistic view assists in the placement of a discharged patient to streamline transitions, including:
• Real-time bed availability and eligibility criteria;
• Electronic referrals, allowing hospitals to send referrals directly to preferred facilities or into a shared pending queue for provider review; and
• Secure, centralized messaging between care settings.
Matsutsuyu described how his company has evolved over many years into a health IT company focused on connecting safety net providers. “One of our solutions is the Cal-AIM platform for our local Orange County Medicaid plan called Cal Optima,” he said. “We created a care coordination platform. Separately from that, we also have an asynchronous solution called eConsult. We have that contracted to LA County Department of Health Services, to a number of Medicaid health plans, and also to the State of Colorado Medicaid plan.”
With recuperative care being one aspect of the Cal-AIM Medicaid transformation effort, Matsutsuyu said he saw an opportunity to improve hospital discharge planning. “I have always noticed that case managers at hospitals are challenged in affecting a good and efficient discharge,” he explained. “Historically, I see these case managers at the hospital faxing to a list of recuperative care or other care facilities to see if they're going to take this patient. Well, in the time it takes them to actually close the loop on that, the patient is in the hospital another day.”
His company developed a web-based platform to offer to acute care hospitals. “We can make the lives of the recuperative care facilities easier by putting them into an electronic environment and give the acute care hospitals the ability to electronically communicate instead of faxing,” he explained. “What we ended up developing was something I compare to hotels.com. You go on a website, you see all of the available facilities, you see all of the available capacity and the types of beds that are available, and then you see the criteria of what that facility can actually provide.”
The current pilot stands at four CommonSpirit hospitals in addition to Huntington Hospital, he said. Five hospitals are participating, but only three have been onboarded so far. “We are in the early stages of ramp-up on the acute care side,” Matsutsuyu said. “While we now have almost 1,000 referrals in the system, much of that comes from the recuperative care facilities themselves that want to use the platform to track and manage the patients.”
The NIMRC people are getting feedback and trying to figure out what's the best way to craft a better solution and the best way to provide training, Matsutsuyu explained.
He believes the solution could expand dramatically. “Our goal is to eventually take this national. Carve away some of the California nuance, and drill it back down to the basic communication of our hotels.com approach,” Matsutsuyu said. “This is so much easier for them to do the discharge in this type of electronic environment. So I'm hopeful that we could show great benefit in California, and I'm hopeful that Bobby Watts, CEO of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council (NHCHC), and his team can take us to the next city that they are active in.”
In June 2025, Healthcare Innovation interviewed Kaiser Permanente’s Pam Schwartz about the value medical respite programs provide and the need for a certification program.
