Signify Health Inc. (NYSE: SGFY) believes that it will be more suited to deal with workforce shortages than other, more traditional home-based care providers.
In fact, it has built a platform that’s flexible and tech-driven specifically to deal with the future in mind – a future that will include workforce issues and a shift to value-based care.
“As a result, we believe we have not experienced the same clinician staffing issues as reported by some others in the industry,” CEO Kyle Armbrester said on a Q3 earnings call Wednesday. “Using the home as a key venue to activate the care journey, we believe coordination of care will be one of our strategic pillars going forward.”
Dallas-based Signify is a tech-enabled value-based care platform. The company partners with both health plans and health systems to deliver various types of care to patients in their homes. The company sees itself as a “significant part” of the shift to value-based payment in the U.S.
In Q3, total revenue for the company increased to $199.2 million, up from $154.7 million year over year.
That growth was mostly driven by its Home & Community Services (HCS) segment, which totaled $169.1 million in revenue in the third quarter, up 47% from the number it posted a year ago during the same period.
The HCS segment growth masked some woes experienced in the Episodes of Care Services (ECS) segment, which saw its revenue decrease 25% year over year, from $40 million in Q3 2020 to just $31.1 million in the third quarter of 2021.
While virtual visits still remained a major part of the company’s at-home evaluations, they continue to decline as Signify tries to re-emphasize in-person visits, which the company believes lead to better outcomes.
“Total evaluation volume for the third quarter was approximately 488,000, including virtual evaluations,” Steven Senneff, Signify’s president and chief financial and administrative officer, said on the call. “Virtual evaluations as a percentage of total evaluations continued to decline through the first nine months of 2021, reflecting customer preference to perform the evaluations in the home, although we saw an uptick in September in certain geographic regions, which we attribute to local COVID spikes.”
The company also believes its in-person evaluations are helping seniors’ social determinants of health, which Signify expects to be a major focus moving forward.
“We’re doing more in the home than ever for our clients by helping to connect their members back into the health system each and every day,” Armbrester said. “We also have made substantial progress on the social-determinants-of-health front, connecting members more than 390,000 times with social services in their community.”
OIG issues with Medicare Advantage
In September, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a report suggesting that Medicare Advantage (MA) companies may be exaggerating patient conditions in order to increase payment.
Given that Signify works with around 50 MA plans, the issue came up during the company’s earnings call.
“This whole notion that there’s any gamesmanship or anything, I think is totally unfounded, No. 1,” Armbrester said. “What the beauty of Medicare Advantage is – and the model that we’ve brought forward, and so many of our plan clients are deeply engaged in – is that it’s genuine preventative medicine, right? We’re moving away from just sick care in this country and [are] instead taking care of folks, and making sure that their conditions and diseases are being managed more appropriately.”
Signify said that the report and any coinciding impact wouldn’t affect it negatively, and that the company actually views it as an opportunity to keep delivering on the care they provide.
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