PopHealthCare Leans into Home-Based Care with Emcara Health

GuideWell Mutual Holding Corporation subsidiary PopHealthCare recently launched value-based national medical group Emcara Health. The new company will focus heavily on home-based advanced primary care for seniors.

“PopHealthCare will continue to exist and provide risk adjustment services while Emcara Health does the home-based care,” Kirk Stanley, president of PopHealthCare, told Home Health Care News. “If you think about our umbrella of services, we do risk adjustment and care. Emcara Health will be care, and PopHealthCare will mainly be focused on the risk-adjustment solutions.”

Founded in 2012, Franklin, Tennessee-based PopHealthCare offers risk-adjustment solutions, in-home assessments and home-based primary care. The company serves health plan clients across 15 states.

Meanwhile, GuideWell is a Jacksonville, Florida-based nonprofit health care parent company.

Emcara Health’s service lines will include one-time in-home assessments, transitions of care support, on-demand provider visits and longitudinal care, meaning primary care in the home, as well as advanced supportive care in collaboration with a patient’s brick-and-mortar primary care provider.

The recently launched enterprise will also include social determinants of health assessments, ER diversion and in-home palliative care.

The organization will serve Medicare Advantage, managed Medicaid and managed Medicare.

Even though PopHealthCare has been delivering home-based care for over seven years, Stanley pointed out that the organization had been doing this under a product-specific model.

“By launching a medical group, it allows our payer partners to have more access to our care solutions. And [we can] offer it through more of a traditional provider arrangement versus more of the vendor-procurement type arrangements,” he said. “Prior to Emcara Health, we might have had a contract doing risk adjustment, and then they tried to fit a care agreement into a non-care contract.”

In other words, the launch allows for some separation between both companies, and it makes room for Emcara Health to provide care as a medical group instead of a branded vendor solution.

With Emcara Health, the company will be able to fully lean into the unique advantages that delivering care in the home offers.

“The home allows for so much more of the behavioral and social components to be addressed,” Stanley said. “Those who are medically complex and frail are better managed, from total cost of care, to care gap closure as well as improvement of quality of life. You can take a holistic approach versus the traditional 12-minute visit to address a singular chief complaint related to one acute event.”

Emcara Health is looking to bend the cost curve and dramatically reduce unnecessary utilization that occurs among those who are medically complex and frail, according to Stanley.

Though newly launched, Emcara Health has already joined the ranks of Amazon Care (Nasdaq: AMZN) and Intermountain Healthcare in advocating on home-based care’s behalf. Emcara Health announced last week that it has become a member of Moving Health Home, a home-based care advancement coalition that counts the aforementioned companies as members.

“By joining Moving Health Home, we get to basically add our voice to this group,” Stanley said. “While it’s a diverse group, all of us are really focused on how to better take care of people and using the home as a clinical site to do so.”

Moving Health Home originally announced the formation of its organization back in March. Broadly, the coalition is focused on making the home a sustainable clinical site of care and changing the way policymakers think about the treatment of patients.

Since Moving Health Home’s inception, BrightStar Care, Landmark Health, Signify Health (NYSE: SGFY), DispatchHealth, Elara Caring, Home Instead Senior Care, Ascension, Amwell (NYSE: AMWL) and Current Health have all joined the coalition.

Looking ahead to 2022, Emcara Health is focused on a number of organization-wide goals.

“We want to continue to expand care in the home, continue to advance our telehealth solutions and community health worker advocacy,” Stanley said. “We already provided care. In over seven years, we’ve done almost 500,000 member months worth of care. All of that knowledge and experience will be rolled into Emcara Health.”