The broadening focus of healthcare past just physical health conditions has led to the creation of new offerings meant to better integrate social care services from the likes of Kaiser Permanente and CVS Health.
A new partnership between the Alliance for Better Health and insurer MVP Health Care is meant to address the social determinants of health through a collaborative model that contributes $800,000 to support local organizations dedicated toward serving patients in need of social care services.
“What we’re doing is expanding the definition of healthcare to invest in social services and behavioral health,” said Alliance for Better Health CEO Jacob Reider.
The collaboration relied on the creation of the Healthy Alliance Independent Practice Association, which is made up of 29 community-based organizations local to the Albany area in New York that tackle social barriers to care like housing, food insecurity and transportation.
Through the IPA, the group was able to directly contract with MVP Health Care on efforts dedicated to improving overall health for community members and decreasing total healthcare spending.
“We wanted to aggregate these services in some way and in partnership with health plans find funding for this coordination because they’re the ones who are footing the bill for increased medical utilization and they will be the ones who reap fiscal benefits from the program’s success,” Reider said.
Healthy Alliance IPA members include a branch of Planned Parenthood, addiction services organization Conifer Park and supportive housing resources nonprofit St. Paul’s Center.
Funding for the IPA is pulled from both MVP Healthcare and the Alliance for Better Health, a state-funded organization focused on reducing preventable emergency department utilizations and hospital admissions.
Like the social care networks from Kaiser and CVS Health, Healthy Alliance’s IPA is using technology from New York-based Unite Us, which has created a platform to aggregate social care services and link providers of both medical care and social services.
Reider underscored that the IPA members are not providing billable medical services, but instead creating a kind of “public utility” intended to improve the health of all community members.
“Part of the reasons that screening for depression has become more commonplace is that depression has become a treatable condition. One of the things we’ve learned from public health is that you only want to screen for things that you can address,” Reider said.
“That kind of answers the question of why we haven’t traditionally screened for issues like food or housing insecurity. Now the network can address those needs by arming the primary care provider with a tool to direct patients.”
Alongside the work of the IPA in creating a central point of distribution for social services, Reider said part of the value created is in the data given back to the organization by payers to help calculate the kinds of cost savings and health benefits from the network.
This, in turn, will help build a stronger evidence base for the program and help engage more payer organizations in the effort to fund the IPA and stitch social care into the fabric of overall healthcare service offerings.
In the short term this kind of benefit can be measured through decreases in the unnecessary utilization of acute care resources.
The model, according to Reider, is intended to align support of social services more closely with the core business models of insurers and healthcare sponsors by moving the spending away from philanthropy and administrative costs and into medical costs.
Moving forward, Reider said the organization is looking to build out further technology tools to make it easier for patients to access and share their health information with social care organizations to better and more holistically inform providers of healthcare needs.
“We’re hoping to spread what we’re doing to other communities. We embrace national initiatives, but since these service providers are local, it’s necessary to build local trust to build the network,” Reider said. “No one’s created an IPA like this before and this is a model that can be replicated nationally.”
Photo: vaeenma, Getty Images
