Elevance Health has plans to expand its post-acute care reach as insurers place a greater focus on care after a hospital stay and on care at home.
Last year, Humana acquired the remaining stake of Kindred at Home, the nation’s largest home-health provider, as insurers increasingly are getting into the business of delivering care.
Elevance, formerly known as Anthem, is leveraging its recent acquisition of myNexus, a home-based nursing management company, to scale up a new post-acute product that was first piloted in the Midwest. Over the next year, Elevance plans to add the post-acute product to all of its Medicare markets.
CEO Gail Boudreaux said on a recent earnings call the program is designed to find the appropriate setting for care, which in turn will help improve outcomes and affordability.
The product aims to better coordinate care among an array of post-acute providers — like rehab and skilled-nursing facilities — when patients are discharged from the hospital. The myNexus technology helps determine the appropriate setting for care for the patient and will have a capitated rate for the episode of care, executives told investors last week.
“This builds in predictable cost-of-care for our partners and the health plans in this case,” Peter Haytaian, executive vice president and president of Carelon, the company’s healthcare services arm, said last week, according to a transcript of the call. “And if we're effective at managing that, we are driving an incremental margin for Carelon and then incremental benefit for Elevance.”
Editor’s note: This headline was updated to include full name of the company.