Zing Health Enterprises, a Chicago-based Medicare Advantage (MA) provider, has announced plans to expand to over 30 additional states through its pending acquisition of Lasso Healthcare.
The two entities ultimately aligned on a deal because of their like-minded approach, according to Dr. Eric Whitaker, the CEO and founder of Zing Health. Lasso Healthcare and Zing Health both focus on providing insurance to underserved seniors, honing in on social determinants of health (SDoH) along the way.
Home-based care providers often address SDoH, and doing so has become especially common over the last few years as MA plan partnerships have become a source of revenue for agencies across the country.
As Zing Health expands, it sees home-based care providers as being partners in their mission to serve seniors.
“I think that home health and home care is a critical component to the health of senior members living their best lives,” Whitaker told Home Health Care News. “And we’re excited — as Zing Health and Lasso Healthcare — to be working with the industry to come up with new and better ways to serve our senior members.”
Founded in 2019, Zing Health is a tech-enabled, physician-led MA provider focused on seniors and individuals with long-term disabilities. Its community-based approach aims to address SDoH at scale, while addressing the singular needs of its members.
The company initially only served Cook County in Illinois, but recently expanded into more Illinois counties and an additional two states. The goal was to grow steadily, but the Lasso Healthcare opportunity was too good to pass up, Whitaker said.
On its end, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania-based Lasso Healthcare has over 6,000 members across 34 states and the District of Columbia. The two companies are expected to officially merge in the third quarter of this year.
“One of the things that is a challenge when you’re thinking about mergers, is trying to find a like-minded partner,” said Whitaker, who is also a physician, public health practitioner and health policy expert. “It was clear when we delved into Lasso that it was a perfect complement to what we were trying to do. For example, they also were focused on a population that’s often underserved, which is rural communities.”
While Zing Health’s primary focus has been on minority communities — such as the Black and Hispanic populations in the Midwest — Lasso Healthcare had been building out a member population in rural communities across the entire country.
“When we launched, we really wanted to be differentiated by the fact that we were founded by physicians,” Whitaker said. “But also to be distinctive about the fact that we were going after these populations that we thought were underserved in urban communities, with a focus on SDoH as a complement to the sort of health care work that we do.”
It stands to reason that the recent expansion of new MA supplemental benefits should also be a tailwind for a SDoH-focused insurance provider like Zing Health, but Whitaker said that hasn’t changed the original mission of the organization.
“Even if [CMS] didn’t extend supplemental benefits, we think that it is part of offering holistic care and would be doing that anyway,” Whitaker said. “So we’re happy that CMS has decided to offer increased supplemental benefits, but it’s the sort of thing that we’ve always done in our work prior to this company and would have tried to incorporate in any case.”
Up until now, Zing Health has worked with more mom-and-pop type home-based care providers, but it is willing to explore national partnerships as it expands both organically and through the Lasso Healthcare acquisition.
The company is still in the early stages, so those partnership plans will probably develop more over the course of this year. It’s already in talks, however, with a larger health system that has a significant home health footprint, Whitaker said.
“It’s still early days in thinking about how this will play out,” he added. “But we certainly would be open to relationships with larger [home-based care] providers.”
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