Anthem Inc. (NYSE: ANTM) believes that its dedication to supplement benefits – including at-home care offerings – is strengthening its value proposition among other health plans.
“In Medicare Advantage (MA), our continuing work to strengthen Anthem’s value proposition helped drive another strong annual election period,” Gail Boudreaux, the president and CEO of Anthem, said on the company’s fourth quarter earnings call Wednesday. “Customers want their benefits to meet their needs today and in the future, and packages like our ‘Everyday Extras’ that offer holistic services such as transportation, personal home health and healthy pre-prepared meal delivery are resonating.”
With its affiliated companies, Anthem serves more than 117 million people, including over 45 million within its portfolio of health plans. As of the fourth quarter, Anthem’s overall customer base included 1.86 million MA members, according to company statistics.
The benefits that Boudreaux highlighted, likely uncoincidentally, are some of the most popular offerings among MA plans in 2022.
Nearly 15% of plans will offer in-home support services through the primarily health-related supplemental benefit pathway in 2022. More will be offering the same through the Special Supplemental Benefits for the Chronically Ill (SSBCI) pathway. Plans are additionally utilizing the SSBCI pathway to offer transportation for non-medical needs (375 total plans), meals beyond a limited basis (403 plans) and food and produce (763 plans).
On its end, Anthem touted its organic growth in MA during the earnings call. In the future, it plans to continue pursuing these benefits as a way to increase enrollment, which could also offer up opportunities to home-based care agencies that wish to work with the company as a partner.
“Offering flexible and personalized benefits will remain a key part of our approach in individual MA, and we expect ongoing enhancements to power another year of double-digit growth in 2022,” Boudreaux said. “We also expect a substantial membership increase in group Medicare Advantage.”
Anthem’s operating revenue was just over $36 billion in the fourth quarter, a 14% increase from the $31.5 billion it posted over the same time period in 2020.
The focus on holistic and in-home care offerings isn’t new for Anthem, but it certainly seems to have ticked up of late.
“Anthem is incredibly, deeply focused on making sure that we are addressing all the aspects of full-person health, including, very importantly, social determinants of health,” Elena McFann, president of Anthem’s Medicare business, told Home Health Care News last year. “Social determinants of health are actually far more likely to drive a health outcome than whether or not someone gets clinical care at a hospital or with a physician.”
The company also last year acquired myNEXUS, a convener that manages home-based care for payers. As it has in previous earnings calls, Anthem pointed to that acquisition as an example of the strategic approach it would be taking with M&A opportunities.
“We’ve become more agile and proactive as we target health plans that deepen our existing benefits business, and [we’re making] acquisitions which diversify and expand our addressable markets,” Boudreaux said. “A good example is our myNEXUS acquisition, which enables members to live healthier lives in their homes. myNEXUS has performed well to date, driven partly by its expanding scope within Anthem. In addition, we expect the ongoing aging of the population and consumer preference for at-home care to propel growth for years to come.”
Peter Haytaian – Anthem’s president of diversified business and its pharmacy benefits line IngenioRx – also said that these investments would drive further value for the company.
“We’re very focused on … how a lot of these solutions stitch together and extend to create further value,” Haytaian said. “For example, if you think about myNEXUS… , and its connection to the home, it allows us to consider a lot of extension product opportunities.”
Product opportunities could include managing durable medical equipment (DME), among other areas, Haytaian said.
“We’ve talked about, for the last several quarters, the importance of social drivers of health and how much [of that] is occurring in the home,” he continued. “That’s one area that we are very interested in.”
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