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What You Should Know
- Papa announced the expansion of its multi-year partnership with eternalHealth, a women-owned Medicare Advantage plan operating in Massachusetts and Arizona.
- The expanded agreement integrates Papa Plus pathways into eternalHealth’s companion care benefit, specifically targeting HEDIS and Health Outcomes Survey (HOS) performance to lift CMS Star Ratings.
- The collaboration introduces three structured, outcomes-driven in-home pathways:
- Post-Discharge Support: Focuses on the critical 30-day post-acute window to prevent 30-day readmissions by assisting with home preparation, prescription pickup, and transportation to follow-up visits.
- Care Gap Closure: Assists members in navigating provider networks, booking preventive screenings, and arranging round-trip transportation.
- Fall Risk Prevention: Conducts non-clinical home hazard assessments (e.g., rugs, cords, clutter) and shares safety observations and fall reports with the health plan for timely follow-up.
Closing the “Last-Mile” Follow-Through Gap
Medicare Advantage plans frequently struggle to achieve preventive screening targets and manage post-acute transitions because member non-compliance is largely driven by non-clinical barriers—including lack of transportation, confusion over discharge instructions, and unaddressed home hazards.
Papa Plus addresses this operational disconnect by embedding standardized clinical and social care workflows into in-home “Papa Pal” visits:
- 30-Day Post-Discharge Stabilization: Focuses on the post-hospitalization window—where roughly 40% of readmissions stem from home-related challenges—by deploying companions to assist with home preparation, discharge regimen compliance, prescription pickups, and transportation to follow-up visits.
- Proactive Care Gap Closure: Identifies overdue preventive screenings, maps local in-network providers, assists members with scheduling, and provides door-to-door transportation to complete required HEDIS encounters.
- Fall Risk Prevention & Hazard Tracking: Identifies environmental hazards (e.g., loose rugs, poor lighting, obstructed walkways) and logs self-reported fall history, routing structured observational data back to eternalHealth for clinical escalation and physical therapy referrals.
- Rapid Multi-State Scaling: Scales alongside eternalHealth’s 170% enrollment growth from 2025 to 2026, building on a baseline of more than 5,000 completed visits where transportation assistance accounted for approximately one in five member requests.
