SCAN Group, the parent of SCAN Health Plan, acquired The Residentialist Group, the insurer's first outside acquisition in its history.
TRG offers clinical care to frail and vulnerable seniors in their homes, SCAN said. The group's operations will be merged with SCAN's in-house home care program, HealthCHEC, to form Homebase Medical, which will provide palliative care, chronic disease management, care transition management and health assessments in patients' homes.
Homebase Medical will serve SCAN members as well as seniors enrolled in other health plans.
SCAN has invested heavily over the past several years in building out its care delivery services, which also include Welcome Health, an in-home primary care provider; myPlace Health, which operates in the PACE program; and Healthcare in Action, a street medicine-based group for homeless seniors, Sachin Jain, M.D., CEO of SCAN Group, told Fierce Healthcare.
"We recognized that Medicare Advantage is certainly one way to keep seniors healthy and independent, but by no means the only way," he said. "We recognize the home is a very, very important place to be receiving care."
TRG made sense as an acquisition from multiple angles, Jain said. For one, SCAN is looking to expand its geographical reach, and the medical group is based in both California and Philadelphia, opening up a new market for the insurer.
TRG is also built on high standards of care quality, driven by its founder Norman Vinn, M.D., who coined the term "residentialist," Jain said.
"We felt like it was a great foundational asset through which we could build new offerings both for SCAN members but also for patients in other health plans," he said.
While there is significant demand for home health among seniors, Jain said SCAN also views its new home-based medical groups as beneficial to the physicians as well, as providing care in this way could be a breath of fresh air for clinicians.
For example, Welcome Health clinicians can spend 100 minutes with a patient on a first home visit, which is much harder to schedule in a traditional doctor's office, he said.
"We want to be very attractive to the best and brightest clinicians and restore joy to the healthcare workforce," Jain said.
The financial terms of the deal were not announced.