SCAN Health Plan Teams Up with MedArrive to Help Homebound Seniors

SCAN Health Plan and MedArrive are teaming up to provide COVID-19 booster and flu shots to homebound seniors throughout California’s Los Angeles and Orange counties. The partnership comes as concerns around the Omicron variant grow.

Led by former Uber Health CEO Dan Trigub, MedArrive uses telehealth technology, emergency medical services (EMS) professionals and other resources to deliver a range of home-based care offerings. The San Francisco-based startup recently raised $25 million, and its other health care partnerships include arrangements with Clover Health (Nasdaq: CLOV) and Bright HealthCare.

The MedArrive-SCAN initiative is providing booster shots at no cost to SCAN members. To go a step further, the health plan and its partner will also administer shots to family caregivers and other eligible individuals in the household.

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The booster program with MedArrive is a follow-up to an earlier SCAN-MedArrive effort to ensure the homebound had access to vaccines – something that has remained a challenge nationally throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Last go round, we took a look at the percentage of our homebound members that were unvaccinated, and that was kind of the impetus that sparked us to launch our in-home vaccination,” SCAN Health Plan Chief Pharmacy Officer Sharon Jhawar told Home Health Care News sister publication Hospice News. “With the flu season on the rise right now, as well as boosters having average momentum, that’s what sparked us to go ahead and do both in this round.”

SCAN covers more than 220,000 beneficiaries. Between 3,000 and 4,000 of those members are designated as homebound by Medicare.

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Nearly 2 million adults older than 65 are considered homebound in the United States, according to The Commonwealth Fund. Many of these patients have multiple chronic conditions or are cognitively impaired and represent the population that is most vulnerable to COVID-19.

Home-focused partnerships like its arrangement with SCAN are exactly what MedArrive had in mind when it raised its recent Series A funding.

“It will also allow us to reach more patients and health plan members in more markets, … and allow us to continue to advance our platform in order to bring more care services on behalf of our partners into the home,” Trigub told HHCN in November.

Getting Americans – especially high-risk individuals – vaccinated with booster shots is currently a key object of the Biden administration. Pfizer-BioNTech recently said that two vaccine doses alone “may not be sufficient to protect against infection” by the Omicron variant, but that three Pfizer doses likely carry increased protection.

As of Tuesday, at least 19 states had reported cases associated with the Omicron variant.

SCAN and MedArrive’s initial vaccine program helped reduce vaccination disparities among underserved populations. Through the effort, the vaccination-rate gap among Latinx members versus white members was reduced to 4%, down from 11%, according to Jhawar.

“Based on where you live, your zip code can determine the potential for your needing more kinds of social support,” Jhawar said.

Since it launched in December 2020, MedArrive has doubled the size of its workforce, expanded into new states and facilitated thousands of home visits. The company currently operates in California, Florida, New Jersey, North Carolina and Texas.

SCAN Group, parent company of SCAN Health Plan, itself invested an undisclosed sum in MedArrive earlier this year.

“We are excited about our evolution, from becoming a MA plan to an entity that’s able to meet members’ needs across the health care value chain,” SCAN corporate development executive Binoy Bhansali told HHCN at the time. “From a framing perspective, that’s how we think about our broader diversification strategy. It’s about how many more lives we impact in a positive way. And an investment in MedArrive is a step toward that goal.”

MedArrive and SCAN have plans for future collaborations, including a second pilot program in which bilingual nurse practitioners help patients with medication adherence.

The decision to invest followed the two organizations’ first vaccine program for the homebound.

“We use that first business-use case to better understand how we can leverage health care professionals such as EMTs to go in the home,” Jhawar said. We found that very beneficial when you have eyes and ears in the home helping folks, and so we decided to invest in them.”

Additional reporting by Jim Parker.

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