In a new partnership with home care company MedArrive and mental health company Brave Health, Superior HealthPlan is hoping to close care gaps among its Medicaid members, the insurer announced Thursday.
Superior HealthPlan, a subsidiary of Centene, is a managed care company serving 1.7 million people throughout Texas. Brave Health is a virtual behavioral health provider primarily serving Medicaid populations, while MedArrive offers home care services like chronic condition management, transitional care, urgent care and more.
The partnership with MedArrive and Brave Health is available for all of Superior’s adult Medicaid populations, and especially targets those who have had high emergency room utilization. MedArrive’s field providers will visit participants’ homes to provide its healthcare services, diagnostics, health assessments and more. If these patients are in need of other types of care, the field providers can connect them with those services. Providing care in the home can greatly benefit these populations, who often don’t have good access to healthcare services, said Dan Trigub, co-founder and CEO of MedArrive.
“When we talk about Medicaid, these are truly some of the most underserved, vulnerable populations living in the poorest communities of Texas, who don’t have quality resources available to them … Unfortunately, the truth is, some of their best sources of care are going to the ER,” Trigub said in an interview.
Additionally, if a field provider notices that a patient could benefit from behavioral health services, that person can be referred to Brave Health. Brave has been working with Superior for about a year now. Trigub said having providers in the home refer patients to a virtual mental health platform makes it more likely they’ll engage with the services.
“What we’ve found is we can have a much bigger impact by connecting them to Brave when we’re in the home standing right next to them,” he said. “Sometimes a family member is in the room. We can educate them on what Brave is, how to use it and literally show them on their own device how to access it.”
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MedArrive will be doing outreach work to find the communities who could benefit the most from the home services. This includes text messaging, phone calls, emails and going door-to-door in some cases, Trigub said.
Superior HealthPlan hopes to ultimately improve patient outcomes and health literacy through this partnership, said Tracy Rico, virtual care director for the insurer.
“It really matters to me that … they’re just healthier and they know more and they’re more empowered to go out and seek the things they need to take care of themselves because they got a chance to find out what all those things were,” Rico said in an interview.
Photo: Kiwis, Getty Images
