Market Trends to Watch for Health Systems and Their Specialty Pharmacies
The future looks bright for the integrated specialty pharmacy model – for health systems, providers, and most importantly, for patients.
In the next two years, Partners in Primary Care — Humana’s payer-agnostic subsidiary — will grow the number of senior-focused care centers it operates to about 100.
Partners in Primary Care is a national senior-focused primary care company, which treats 57,000 patients in Medicare Advantage plans from 15 different payers as well as other types of health plans, said Matt Eirich, chief growth officer of Humana’s Care Delivery Organization, in an email.
The Care Delivery Organization includes both Partners in Primary Care and the Family Physicians Group, which Humana acquired in 2018.
Partners in Primary Care opened 15 new centers in 2020, and it plans to open up to 20 more this year. The new centers will be located in the Atlanta and Houston areas, as well as in Louisiana and Nevada.
The Funding Model for Cancer Innovation is Broken — We Can Fix It
Closing cancer health equity gaps require medical breakthroughs made possible by new funding approaches.
The centers are staffed by physicians and care teams who specialize in treating the senior population. Caregivers create personalized plans for patients, which include help with social, behavioral, and financial needs.
The first Partners in Primary Care facility opened in 2016 in Greenville, South Carolina. The company now operates 40 centers in seven markets.
By 2023, Partners in Primary Care expects to operate around 100 senior-focused care centers. This includes 22 centers in the Orlando, Florida, area branded as Family Physicians Group.
“Partners in Primary Care is expanding rapidly because of the demand from seniors for the type of senior-focused care we provide,” said Renee Buckingham, president of Humana’s Care Delivery Organization, in a news release.
In-person primary care faced severe disruptions amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Most primary care encounters (92.9%) in 2018 and 2019 were in-person, according to a study published in JAMA Open Network. But office-based visits decreased from an average quarterly visit volume of 116.9 million for 2018-2019 to 105.9 million in the first quarter of 2020. It then further dipped to 58.7 million in the second quarter of last year.
But Partners in Primary Care centers were able to grow in-person care delivery — based on claims through October 2020, 87% of its patients made one or more visits to their local center last year, compared to 75% in 2019, the news release states.
For Humana, Partners in Primary Care provides an opportunity to stake out a corner of the market for senior-focused primary care, which “is really in its infancy,” Eirich said.
“We have learned over multiple decades in senior health and care delivery how impactful senior-focused, value-based primary care can be in improving outcomes, lowering costs, and enhancing quality of life for those with Medicare,” he added. “On top of that, our experience operating and launching Partners in Primary Care centers shows that communities and seniors across the country appreciate and value our unique value proposition. We continue to see new patients joining our practices in large numbers across all of our markets.”
Photo: diego_cervo, Getty Images