Prominence Health Plan is now working with Strive Health to offer additional kidney treatment to its members, the companies announced last week.
Nevada-based Prominence Health Plan provides coverage to commercial businesses and Medicare beneficiaries. Denver-based Strive Health offers at-home and virtual support for chronic kidney disease, end-stage kidney disease, dialysis and kidney transplant. It uses technology and analytics to identify the disease stage patients are in and define the best interventions. It then connects patients with a care team, which includes nurse practitioners, dietitians, care coordinators and social workers.
Through the partnership, Prominence Health Medicare Advantage enrollees will have 24/7 access to Strive Health’s specialized care team. Strive Health will work with primary care physicians, nephrologists and transplant specialists within Prominence’s network to “ensure that patients have a seamless care journey,” according to the news release.
Strive Health is also teaming up with Sierra Nevada Specialty Care, a local nephrology clinic in Nevada.
“Our caregivers will be interacting with their caregivers,” said Chris Riopelle, CEO of Strive Health, in an interview. “We will work together on specific patients and rosters and we’ll be an incremental extension of that group’s [work] in the geography so that we can care for patients during times and periods where perhaps they aren’t able to. We will be an augmentation of their practice and they’ll be an augmentation of our work.”
Strive Health and Prominence Health Plan are engaged in a shared savings value-based care contract. The relationship will be focused on reducing unnecessary hospitalizations, reducing unnecessary emergency department visits and creating more adoption of home dialysis.
“[Health plans] have a number of members who are late-stage kidney disease patients,” Riopelle said. “They are attributed to us. We enroll them and engage them and when we reduce the cost and improve the quality on that population, there are savings that are generated and we share in those savings with our health plan partners and others.”
Currently, more than one in seven adults in the U.S., or 35.5 million people, have chronic kidney disease, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. About nine in 10 adults with chronic kidney disease don’t know they have it, and about one in three adults with severe chronic kidney disease don’t know they have it. Prominence Health Plan aims to improve these stats by working with Strive Health, said Dr. Traci Biondi, chief medical officer of the insurer.
“The opportunity to better serve our kidney care members and slow their disease progression is clear,” Biondi said in a news release.
The partnership follows a recent $166 million Series C funding round for Strive Health. Riopelle previously told MedCity News that the company is using the funds to expand into new markets.
Other kidney care companies include Monogram Health and Somatus.
Photo: peterschreiber.media, Getty Images
