Homebase Medical, a subsidiary of SCAN Group, is developing a new palliative model to care for some of the Medicare Advantage organization’s most vulnerable beneficiaries.
This development comes as SCAN, the parent company of SCAN Health Plan, prepares to combine with fellow nonprofit CareOregon, which has a large Medicaid portfolio. Post-transaction, the combined organization will be known as the HealthRight Group.
Like other payers, SCAN Group also operates a range of provider businesses. Homebase Medical previously operated as The Residential Group until SCAN acquired the company in 2022. It provides Medicare welcome visits, transitional care visits and palliative care for frail older adults.
The subsidiary has grown considerably in terms of its number of home visits, according to SCAN Group CEO Sachin Jain, who said he was “excited” about the clinical innovations in the works at Homebase Medical. This included what he called a clinical-first palliative care model.
“One of my observations of the palliative care models that exist in our industry is that there’s a lot of what I would call labor arbitrage, where they take work that used to belong to a specialist palliative care doctor and give it to generalists, or work that used to belong to generalist physicians and give it to nurse practitioners, and so on,” Jain told Hospice News. “What we’re trying to do is build care teams that are truly sensitive to the diagnoses and the symptoms of the patients. It’s really a clinical-first model.”
SCAN has engaged some of the “leading thinkers in palliative care” nationwide as consultants on the model’s development, Jain indicated.
SCAN is a $4.3 billion nonprofit Medicare Advantage (MA) organization that covers more than 285,000 members across California, Arizona, Nevada and Texas.
Homebase Medical is just one of several provider businesses in SCAN’s portfolio.
Others include a geriatric home-based primary care medical group called Welcome Health; Housecall Providers, an in-home primary and palliative care business; and the PACE program MyPlace Health, a joint venture between SCAN and Commonwealth Care Alliance (CCA). It also has a mobile team designed for institutional special needs plan beneficiaries.
SCAN also operates Healthcare in Action, a medical group for people experiencing homelessness. The organization currently has 11 mobile care teams deployed throughout several California communities, including Long Beach, West Hollywood, San Mateo and San Diego, among others.
