SCAN Health Plan is teaming up with the Springs Living, a senior living organization, to launch new co-branded products that aim to offer a more connected experience for people living in these communities.
The co-branded offerings will be available on Jan. 1 for older adults living in Oregon's Clackamas and Washington counties, marking SCAN's expansion into the Beaver State. The products are designed around a care model that seeks to connect the day-to-day support provided to older adults in assisted living communities with their medical care.
The goal, the partners said, is to bring critical care closer to home for vulnerable patients. The approach combines SCAN's experience in providing benefits to older adults, including through institutional special needs plans (I-SNPs), and the Springs' history of designing living spaces for aging adults.
Fee Stubblefield, founder and CEO of the Springs Living, told Fierce Healthcare in an interview that he uses his father as an example in considering the opportunity in the partnership. His father lives in the Springs' memory care facilities, and requires a visit from a podiatrist every two weeks.
His current coverage has a limit on covered podiatry visits that meets his needs, Stubblefield said, and taking his father to visits that frequently is destabilizing and difficult for him, the Springs' caregivers and the family. Through the SCAN partnership, those podiatry services will instead be provided at home.
That helps ease some challenges for both the patient and the care team, Stubblefield said. It also allows clinicians to hear more directly from the caregivers on the ground.
"They're connecting with the people that are with him every single day, our care staff, because they are the ones that really know him," he said.
SCAN CEO Sachin Jain, M.D., told Fierce that older adults often need a level of care that is "underrepresented in clinical training," which can make it difficult to rethink care models in this way. The process starts with hands-on time with the patient and learning more about what they want from their healthcare.
In addition to making the patient experience simpler, bringing these key services into the home can avert significant negative outcomes, like a hospital-acquired infection or intensive care unit delirium, Jain said.
"A big part of what we're trying to do is match the care desired to the care received," he said. "I think that's been a missing component in a lot of clinical care and clinical service to this population, for which the default is to just head to the emergency room every time there's a problem."
Jain added that a partner like the Springs Living is a "holy grail" for an I-SNP, as it allows the model to operate at its full potential.
The partners intend to treat the early days of the partnership as a learning experience, iterating on the care model and identifying ways to improve the experience for members moving forward. Stubblefield said the Springs has worked since its founding to establish a senior living community that makes this type of partnership possible.
"We see this as the future," he said. "We want to be anywhere that SCAN is."