How Signify Health’s Home Evaluations Are Helping Drive Value-Based Care

No longer satisfied with just being a player in the value-based care space, Signify Health Inc. (NYSE: SGFY) ultimately is seeking to be a transformative force in health care.

Its strategic plan reflects the general moment of home-based care and innovative payment arrangements as well.

“As we think about our product roadmap, the core of our strategy is to build out capabilities to connect health plans and other risk-bearing entities with provider groups, in an effort to accelerate the transformation of the U.S. health care system from fee-for-service to value-based care,” CEO Kyle Armbrester said on a Q1 earnings call Thursday. “We plan to contribute to genuine care redesign.”

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As a company, Dallas-based Signify is a tech-enabled, value-based care platform that partners with both health plans and health systems to deliver a variety of care services to patients in their homes.

One key component of being a force in the value-based care space is Signify’s commitment to delivering care in the home setting while working in concert with the company’s other capabilities.

“We want to be at the industry forefront as an intermediary providing data and insight, activating the home, managing chronic conditions, facilitating the launch of programs through a shared-savings payment structure to make all parties accountable and working together to drive better outcomes for individuals throughout the country,” Armbrester said.

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For Signify, data is the avenue for powering and creating value-based programs.

“We’re able to capture hundreds of data points in each in-home evaluation,” Armbrester said. “We have about 40 million members in our data chassis, and we expect to perform approximately 2.4 million evaluations in 2022.” 

Another major component of the company’s value-based mission was its acquisition of Caravan Health, an accountable care organization (ACO) manager. Signify agreed to acquire Caravan earlier this year, for a price tag of $250 million.

Signify believes its acquisition of Caravan will allow the company to provide total cost of care management services and drive “meaningful” shared savings in the ACO Medicare Shared Savings Program.

Additionally, Signify’s home evaluations will serve as a critical tool for condition management and cost containment for the company’s ACO clients. The company’s Transition to Home program will also play a role in driving better outcomes, according to Armbrester.

“I’m very pleased with the positive reaction from our clients who are excited about the prospect of Signify Health providing a total cost of care model,” he said. “Since the close of the acquisition, the Caravan leadership team and I have been on the road meeting with customers about integrating Caravan’s extensive primary care provider relationships with Signify’s specialty care provider relationships and industry-leading home evaluation and episodes-of-care capabilities. The combination enhances the value proposition to providers, as our services have multi-payer applicability.”

Armbrester noted that multi-payer applicability referred to Signify’s “deep relationships” from existing contracts with private insurers, states and the federal government.

The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) ACO REACH Model creates another potential avenue of growth for Signify and Caravan’s combined business model.

“We recently submitted our application to participate in the ACO REACH program and will continue to access the proposed program structure, and how we can best leverage our combined capabilities to maximize that opportunity, which launches in January of 2023,” Armbrester said.

Overall, Signify brought in $216.5 million for Q1, a 20% increase compared to $180.0 million in the first quarter of 2021. Growth in the first quarter was driven by a 23% increase in Home & Community Services (HCS) segment revenue, which totaled $186.9 million.

Signify’s HCS revenue was a quarterly record and is the result of an increase in home evaluations. The company’s home evaluations checked in at 564,000, compared to 462,000 during the same period in 2021.

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