Pine Park Health Expands Value-Based Care Model, With Affordable Housing a Target

Pine Park Health is expanding its value-based health care model further into the affordable senior housing sector.

Pine Park Health Chief Commercial Officer Dan O’Neill announced last week on LinkedIn that the company has expanded its value-based, in-home primary care model to serve nearly 400 more residents in Northern California.

Pine Park currently operates in three affordable housing communities operated by HumanGood and Eden Housing.

The further expansion in affordable housing comes after the organization raised $44 million in 2021 and 2020. Pine Parks’s wider portfolio includes a presence in more than 80 senior living communities, across nine different counties throughout California and Arizona.

For Pine Park, the partnerships with HumanGood and Eden Housing are part of an effort to expand its value-based portfolio of in-home primary care operations into affordable housing, where those services can benefit low-income residents.

O’Neill added that the company will “almost certainly” launch onsite primary care services for at least two more affordable communities with HumanGood, Eden Housing and potentially another operator by the end of this year.

“We got started last year working with both HumanGood and Eden Housing … to roll this out in affordable senior living,” O’Neill told Senior Housing News. “We’re expecting to [open in] at least one more Eden community in the next four to six weeks.”

He added:. “Our intent isn’t to do, say, 30, at once, it’s to do three or four at once, get it right … crawl, walk, run.”

With HumanGood Pine Park is expecting to add a few more communities to its portfolio in the coming months – most likely throughout the San Francisco Bay Area in Alameda and San Mateo counties as the company prioritizes the product type.

Pine Park’s in-home primary care model involves opening a physical office in senior living communities where residents can get outpatient care services,usually from a physician’s assistant or a nurse practitioner, who are supervised by physicians.

“They will be assigned to a couple of clinic days where they’re seeing patients and taking care of them,” said O’Neill. “We’re actually visiting residents in their units or cottages.”

Though it is an immediate growth area, affordable housing is only a part of Pine Park’s growth strategy. Indeed, the company has in 2022 opened in approximately two to four new communities each month with plans to continue its expansion at a steady clip in the final third of 2022.

. In California, Pine Park has partnered with some recognizable names in senior living like Brookdale (NYSE: BKD), Pacific Retirement Services and Senior Resource Group (SRG)..

“We’re steadily expanding to new markets and expect to be in our third state (Nevada) by the end of this year,” said O’Neill.

Value-based care as an operational strategy

Pine Park’s push into affordable housing is an effort to better serve the growing number of older adults who need but can’t afford typical private-pay senior living. Most affordable housing residents qualify for Medicaid or other public assistance, and Pine Park is leaning on its value-based health care model for future growth.

“One of the advantages of these value-based care contracts is that you can take some of the financial resources that just pour into our traditional health care system and, done well, you can be more flexible and creative in how you operationalize care delivery,” O’Neill told SHN.

Value-based care has long been a beacon in medicine as a solution to the reimbursement system that relies on something called a relative value unit (RVU) to compensate providers. In this system, physicians receive more compensation from Medicare based on the number of RVUs provided in a practice, thus incentivizing patient volume over patient outcome.

“Value-based care has been talked about for a long time. I think it’s only now starting to become real in a meaningful way,” said O’Neill.

Pine Park is exclusively a value-based care operation and has been from the very beginning, when Co-Founder and CEO George Khasin saw a need for more resident-centric care delivered in the senior living communities where they live.

In the meantime, Pine Park is working to create new arrangements with insurance providers and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) while prioritizing its value-based care philosophy.

“What we’re hoping to do with these first few affordable housing buildings is dial in the operational adjustments that we’ll need to make for buildings that have a lower staffing ratio… that don’t have the full complement of care staff that you might see at a Brookdale community,” O’Neill said.