With $44M Raised, Pine Park Health To Expand Senior Living-Focused Primary Care Model

Having raised $44 million, Pine Park Health is poised to bring primary care into more senior living communities in 2022 and beyond.

Founded in 2019, Pine Park is part of a new generation of providers reinventing how primary care is delivered to older adults. Like companies such as Oak Street Health and Cano Health, Pine Park contracts with Medicare Advantage plans that are seeking to control their costs by working with partners that can more effectively manage beneficiary populations.

Unlike those other companies, Pine Park’s model is specifically geared toward senior living.

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“I think all of us, probably all of this class of company, have a similar set of ideas about reinventing primary care, making it holistic, making it coordinated and making it accountable for total cost of care, and using technologies as a significant part of that transformation,” Dan O’Neill, chief commercial officer at Pine Park, told SHN. “But there are huge differences in serving the senior living environments — their operational needs, cadences, patterns and practices.” 

The focus on senior living is paying off in the form of business expansion: Pine Park already provides services in about 50 communities, mostly in northern California, and is working with operators such as HumanGood, SRG and Westmont Living.

In late 2021, the company began serving the San Diego market and plans to expand through Southern California over the next year-and-a-half, while also expanding into the Phoenix metropolitan area later in 2022.

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Meeting a need

The origin story of Pine Park traces back to co-founder and CEO George Khasin’s work on remote monitoring solutions for senior living.

In the course of his research, Khasin lived in a senior living community for a period of time, and he recognized a need that went beyond remote monitoring, for more accessible care built around the needs of residents and operators.

“He really came to it organically, living in a community and seeing for himself what was missing — what the staff needed, what the patient needed — and then he started thinking through how to build this,” O’Neill explained.

The timing was right to address this need because of larger-scale changes underway in the U.S. health care system. Specifically, shifts away fee-from-service and toward value-based care created new flexibilities and payment models. An organization such as Pine Park can now take on contracts based on the potential to improve total cost of care for patient populations through services such as care coordination.

The Pine Park model involves pods of physicians, nurse practitioners and medical assistants who provide on-site care and services in senior living communities. They see residents in their rooms, and the clinicians also typically have a space in the community to position supplies and equipment to enable quicker response to particular issues.

For example, Pine Park can have urinalysis equipment on-site, so that if a resident is having urinary tract infection symptoms, tests can be run immediately and antibiotics prescribed right away.

“We’re not waiting for specimens to go out to a lab and come back two days later … and by that point, somebody has gone to the emergency room,” O’Neill said.

The primary care team will hold clinical hours for regularly scheduled examinations and checkups but also are available for urgent issues, and are usually able to be on-site in a matter of hours.

The ability to quickly diagnose and treat conditions, and respond to emergent issues, is critical to preventing hospitalizations and keeping costs down, to the benefit of residents as well as to Pine Park and its insurer partners. Today, Pine Park participates in traditional Medicare and is in-network for all major Medicare Advantage insurers in California, O’Neill said. If a senior living provider were to start its own institutional special needs plan (ISNP), Pine Park could work with that plan as well.

“I think our job is to really build this and accept as many residents as possible and optimize to serve the senior living environment,” O’Neill said. “And then on the back end, of course, my team has the job of setting up the value-based relationships with as many health plans as possible so that we can make the numbers work.”

Some health plans have insurance products specifically designed for senior living residents, including clinical teams to serve these beneficiaries. In these cases, Pine Park takes a collaborative approach with all the different members of the care team working at a particular community.

“If value-based primary care is done right, then that primary care practitioner becomes the go-to for the patient, for the family, for the community staff or other social services that might be there to support that family,” O’Neill said.

A growing trend

Pine Park may soon be facing a more crowded field of competitors, as companies like Oak Street and Cano eye senior living as a growth area for their primary care services. And already, senior living communities are exploring other options for bringing more health care on site, such as by working with Anthem affiliate CareMore in an initiative involving Welltower (NYSE: WELL).

This trend highlights that senior living providers increasingly recognize the potential benefits that come from these types of partnerships — benefits that O’Neill enumerated.

“Number one, we hear repeatedly from communities that this is helping them attract move-ins in a competitive market; families are particularly worried about health and safety in the wake of the pandemic,” O’Neill said. “And having an onsite physician presence is a very differentiated amenity for a lot of these communities.”

Given that Pine Park’s mandate is to promote health and wellness of residents, the company’s involvement also drives length of stay and family satisfaction, he emphasized.

Furthermore, Pine Park also helps ease staff burdens.

“We end up taking on quite a bit of the care coordination, the administrative burdens for clinical care that often fall to the community staff — arranging lab tests, scheduling specialist appointments, following up afterward … to find out what happened, figure out if anything needs to change in the medication regimen or diet, rehab, those sorts of things,” O’Neill said.

Having raised a first round of capital in 2020 and a Series B round over the summer of 2021, Pine Park now is set up for a year or two of growth. Backers include Canvas Ventures and other investors.

In addition to rolling out in new markets, Pine Park is investing in the technology it uses to coordinate all its clinicians operating in the field. And the company also has O’Neill’s expertise to draw on as it expands; he joined Pine Park in April 2021, and his resume includes a year as a Robert Wood Johnson Fellow at the National Academy of Medicine, where he worked on the transition to value-based care. He also has advised and consulted various venture-backed health care firms, and was a senior vice president and general manager for Change Healthcare, among other experiences.

His belief in Pine Park’s model is supported by the comments of some senior living providers the firm is working with, underscoring the role that the company could play in the evolution of senior living communities into more comprehensive hubs of care for older adults.

For instance, Westmont Living President Andy Plant highlighted Pine Park in a recent appearance on the Senior Housing News Transform podcast, when describing Westmont’s goal of becoming a “one-stop shop” for residents.

“We’re also setting up primary care offices in our communities so that if someone wants to see a physician, they can do that there as opposed to going out,” Plant said. “We just want to broaden their services and be able to serve our customers the best way possible.”

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