Home care company MedArrive teamed up with virtual maternal care provider Ouma Health to bring maternity services into Medicaid members’ homes, the companies announced Monday.
New York City-based MedArrive serves patients in their home and offers services for a variety of things including chronic condition management, transitional care and urgent care. Ouma Health, based in Park City, Utah, is a telehealth platform that provides access to maternal-fetal medicine physicians, midwives, perinatal nurse navigators, lactation specialists and behavioral health specialists. Rather than offer its services via an app in the way Maven Clinic or Ovia Health do, it serves patients by phone, text and video.
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Through the partnership, MedArrive can now connect its Medicaid patients to Ouma’s services. MedArrive’s Medicaid partners include Centene subsidiary Superior HealthPlan, Health Net and Molina. When MedArrive’s providers visit patients’ homes, they screen for patients’ needs and will connect them to Ouma if they determine the patients require maternal health support. MedArrive will set patients up with Ouma while the MedArrive providers are in the home, and can also provide patients with instructions on how to access Ouma when the providers are not in the home, said MedArrive CEO and Co-founder Dan Trigub.
“One thing that we’ve seen and one thing that we’ve heard from our partners — these Medicaid plans in particular — is that we need to do more around maternity care,” Trigub said in an interview. “We need to find ways that we can provide these services to a population that doesn’t have anybody coming to the home, they’re disengaged.”
Being able to care for members virtually and in the home via MedArrive is especially important for Medicaid members, said Dr. Sina Haeri, CEO and co-founder of Ouma.
“A lot of Medicaid moms, a lot of moms living in resource-limited settings, erroneously get labeled as non-compliant for not showing up for appointments,” Haeri said in an interview. “That’s bogus. The reason it’s bogus is, oftentimes, they have a minimum wage job that doesn’t give them time off. They can’t afford childcare, they can’t afford gas money, they can’t afford the parking to see a specialist. By doing this, I think we’re solving for that no-show, that non-compliant piece and getting the care to them rather than them driving in.”
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Research shows that there is a significant unmet need when it comes to maternal health services, a gap that this partnership likely wants to fill. Access to maternal-fetal medicine services differs widely by location, with many Americans living in maternity care deserts and needing to travel long distances, according to the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Maternal mortality rates are also climbing in the U.S., especially among minority women.
Payment through the partnership between MedArrive and Ouma will vary by payer, with contracts functioning on a fee-for-service model, claims-based billing or value-based care model, the companies said. In the case of value-based care arrangements, the companies aim to create savings by reducing spend on nursery admissions, emergency department visits and overall pregnancy care costs, as well as other metrics.
MedArrive appears to be building out a platform that can support different healthcare needs. Back in December, MedArrive announced a collaboration with virtual mental health provider Brave Health to serve Superior HealthPlan Medicaid members.
Joining in-home services with virtual services — whether it be with Ouma or Brave — makes the care significantly stronger, Trigub declared.
“The combination of doing it in the home, and having that physical extension of their provider showing the member how to use these tools and resources, it’s just exponentially a much better outcome than by itself,” he said.
Photo credit: Knape, Getty Images
