Deploying EMTs to Reach Vulnerable Health Plan Members
Managed care organizations such as California’s Health Net are reaching vulnerable populations in their homes through partnership with a company called MedArrive that sends paramedics, emergency medical technicians (EMTs), and other healthcare professionals into the home.
Health Net, a Medi-Cal managed care company, is offering in-home COVID-19 vaccinations to its most vulnerable members and their families. A licensed, trained EMT or other healthcare professional will administer the vaccine to them and any family member who wants to be vaccinated.
MedArrive also has worked with SCAN Health Plan, Clover Health, Bright HealthCare, and Molina Healthcare.
In a recent interview, Dan Trigub, co-founder and CEO of MedArrive, described his company’s business model and the potential for this type of partnership with managed care organizations. MedArrive has more than 50,000 EMS providers in its national network, and services span clinical use cases ranging from chronic condition management, transitional care, readmission prevention, urgent care, and vaccinations to palliative care.
He said the company’s core customers today are value-based payers and providers — primarily managed Medicaid plans and Medicare Advantage ACOs. “We want to build tools for them to better serve their members,” he said. “We have built a national network of field providers. At the core of our field providers, we are leveraging EMTs and paramedics. We believe our highly trained and skilled workforce are very cost-effective and they're everywhere in rural communities and large metropolitan areas. We provide them with physician oversight via telemedicine.”
MedArrive works to lower the total cost of care for health plan partners, which in many cases comes down to reducing ED utilization. “With Molina Healthcare, for example, we served their Medicaid and dual-eligibles in Texas,” Trigub said. “They give us a list of that population. We reach out to those members, enroll them into our program, and provide valuable services, mostly chronic care management, to reduce those unnecessary ED utilizations, admissions and hospitalizations.”
Another area of focus, he said, is closing care gaps and ultimately helping with things like HEDIS gap closure, which helps generate revenue for health plans and helps with member retention and recruitment.
Trigub said that MedArrive wasn’t initially built with the idea of bringing COVID vaccinations into the home, but during the pandemic they had several health plans, including SCAN Health Plan and Health Net, reach out about that service. “They have vulnerable populations who are homebound for a variety of reasons,” he said. “They ask us to bring the vaccination to them, and while we are there, we can do a health risk assessment to garner much more valuable information about more social determinant of health matters and help close any other care gaps while we're there. We executed on that with SCAN and it went so well they became an investor. Now we're moving to higher-value use cases and more longitudinal care with partners like that.”
Trigub said that MedArrive can serve as a bridge between pure telehealth and onsite clinical care, “and since we're in the home, there's a much richer set of data that we can collect on a patient that you would never get in a doctor's office. What we do is known as community paramedicine, or some call it mobile integrated healthcare. It's not a novel concept. What's novel about MedArrive is that we can do it at scale and we wrap technology around it.”
He also stressed that they don't use only EMS professionals. “Ultimately, the big vision is, no matter what the use case is, no matter who the field provider is, no matter who our partner is, we can power the program," he said. "We started with EMS, but we've run programs with LPNs. We've run programs with community health workers.”
Founded in December 2020, MedArrive announced $25 million in Series A funding in November 2021. Section 32 led the round with participation from new investors 7wireVentures and Leaps by Bayer and existing investors Define Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Redesign Health.