Humana CFO: Primary Care Growth To Accelerate Home Health Utilization

Over the next few years, Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM) hopes to have more of its members utilizing all three of its health care service arms in order to drive up margins and revenues. That plan includes CenterWell Home Health.

If CenterWell Primary Care continues to grow at the rate that it is, CenterWell Home Health’s footprint will undoubtedly grow with it, Humana CFO Susan Diamond said during the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.

“If you can get primary care to grow, they sort of hold the strings for so many other opportunities,” Diamond said. “They can enroll and refer to CenterWell Pharmacy, they can enroll and refer to CenterWell Home Health. We’ll roll out the value-based model and that will inherently get more people in the [home health] model, but what we really want to see is our [primary care] physicians working with our home health assets to ask, ‘When you were serving my patients, why were you seeing readmissions? What is it that’s needed?’”

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Humana’s home health entity – CenterWell Home Health, formerly Kindred at Home – has over 350 locations in 38 states.

Today, Humana has about 700,000 members covered under its value-based home health model, which is about 14% of its member population. Diamond believes the company is on track to achieve its goal of having 50% of members underneath this model over the next couple of years.

As part of Humana’s growth strategy, the company is hoping to accelerate its own understanding of what causes some of the adverse outcomes for primary care patients and how the company can integrate services under its own umbrella.

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“While we don’t have a lot to share yet, we do think over the next couple of years, as we have more patients using multiple services and we increase our learning, we’ll be able to share with you what are the outcomes that we can demonstrate,” Diamond said. “Both in terms of reducing total cost of care and readmissions, but also just a deeper engagement.”

Which, Diamond said, should lead to better STAR scores, better revenue yield, higher retention rates and other positive benefits for the company and its members.

During an update on the heels of Humana’s fourth-quarter earnings call, Diamond also highlighted the 500,000 new members Humana added during the annual enrollment period for Medicare and an updated guidance growth of at least 625,000 MA members, which represents a 13.6% year-over-year increase.

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