Los Angeles-based Heal is among the in-home primary care providers working to “bring back the house call” in modern medicine. It’s doing so in 2022 with a pretty major overhaul to its business strategy.
Launched in 2014 by husband-and-wife team Dr. Renee Dua and Nick Desai, Heal started out as an on-demand primary care company serving the general public instead of a targeted patient population. About a year ago, however, Heal pivoted to focus exclusively on seniors.
CEO Scott Vertrees – a former Heal advisor who took over as its top-executive at the beginning of last March – led the charge on the strategic shift.
“Almost immediately after my appointment, I started interviewing all the talent in the business to find out what the best strategy [and] direction was,” Vertrees told Home Health Care News. “The ultimate premise for Heal going to the home with its tech-enabled solutions is that we can provide better outcomes for patients. The population that most needs that help is the senior population.”
In addition to his role at Heal, Vertrees is co-founder and managing member with Javergo Partners LLC. From 2019 to 2020, he served as executive chairman and CEO of EasyPay Finance.
The decision to focus on seniors was a relatively easy one, Vertrees explained.
“The ultimate premise for Heal going to the home with its tech-enabled solutions is that we can provide better outcomes for patients. The population that most needs that help is the senior population.”
– Heal CEO Scott Vertrees
For starters, the sheer size of the senior population is projected to double over the next 40 years. And often, Seniors have trouble seeing their primary doctor on a regular basis, with many of these care gaps exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think our plan today is to focus on seniors because that’s, again, where we think we can make the most difference in terms of trying to change the landscape of health care,” Vertrees said. “To make it work much better than it has been.”
Taking risk
Currently, Heal’s two largest markets are Georgia and New York. It also offers its services to seniors in Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, New Jersey and Washington, plus Chicago, Illinois.
The new seniors-first strategy isn’t the only way Heal has overhauled its business strategy. Instead of an on-demand, episodic approach, Heal is now committed to a value-based care mentality where it manages patients on a longitudinal basis.
“We actually enter into risk contracts, both with Medicare Advantage (MA) plans and with Medicare through direct contracting, to take responsibility for the ultimate outcomes of patients in a primary care environment,” Vertrees said. “It’s a huge shift in strategy.”
Heal itself isn’t a direct-contracting entity (DCE), as not many organizations are. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) reported last April that there were just 53 DCEs participating in the first performance year of the Global and Professional direct-contracting models.
The house calls company is able to work within the direct-contracting space by subcontracting with close partner – and investor – Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM), which is a DCE.
Humana invested $100 million into Heal in July 2020 to fast-track its growth.
“As seen in other industries, we believe consumers will increasingly demand health care solutions that are more convenient and personalized and [that] better meet their needs,” Humana CFO Susan Diamond told HHCN at the time.
In total, Heal has raised over $164 million since its launch.
A ‘360-degree view of the patient’
While parts of Heal’s business model have changed, others have stayed the same.
The Heal platform, for example, remains a “trimodal” combination of in-person visits, telemedicine and remote patient monitoring, Vertrees said.
“We’re really working to bring all three of those components together, so we get a really good 360-degree view of the patient,” he said.
The company also rolled out its “Avatar” offering, which sends a medical assistant into the home to help patients communicate with their clinician via tablet while delivering any immediate hands-on support required.
So far, the new strategic direction has been going well for Heal, Vertrees noted.
While he declined to share base numbers, he said Heal has tripled its number of providers, or clinicians, year over year. During the same period, it has grown its panel of patients by over 100%.
“We’re looking to achieve similar – or even greater – year-over-year metrics going forward,” Vertrees added.
Along with Heal’s growth, Vertrees is excited about Heal’s evolving leadership team, he told HHCN.
In 2021, Heal promoted Dr. Justin Zaghi and Sam Nuziale to chief medical officer and CTO, respectively. It also hired Humana veteran Brent Stice as chief growth officer and added ChenMed veteran Raymond Jimenez as COO.
“It’s a team that I’m really proud of, from the standpoint of everybody pulling together in the right direction,” Vertrees said.
Home health partnerships
Moving forward, Vertrees and Heal’s leadership team are focused on growing the company’s referral-partner network while making operational improvements to ensure the experience is “just as good for providers as it is for patients,” Vertrees said.
It’s likewise looking to maintain its strong relationships with home health agencies in its markets.
“Home health needs a primary care relationship – and especially for the unengaged patients who don’t have a historical relationship with their primary care provider, we represent a really convenient option,” Vertrees said. “We really make a great partner to be able to provide the primary care coverage that home health agencies need.”
And at least at this point, Heal isn’t worried about increased competition in the in-home primary care space.
CareMax Inc. (Nasdaq: CMAS), Patina Health, VillageMD and Emcara Health are just some of today’s top players, though not all of them are focused on senior care.
“We, to some degree, welcome that,” Vertrees said. “We think that it is sort of a validation of the strategy, in terms of the impact that home care in a primary care environment can have on the outcomes of seniors. Obviously, any good business model is going to track competition.”
The post ‘Huge Shift in Strategy’ Paying Off for House Calls Company Heal appeared first on Home Health Care News.
