Medicare Advantage in Senior Living Gets Boost with $300M Investment in AllyAlign

AllyAlign has a significant new investment and a new CEO — and now, the company is looking to expand its model of care for older adults.

The Glen Allen, Virginia-based company, which helps senior living and care providers launch and run Medicare Advantage institutional special needs (I-SNP) plans, announced Thursday it received a $300 million capital infusion from an investment group led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA).

The big investment round is the latest signal that Medicare Advantage plans and coordinated care models are becoming more commonplace in senior living. The rise of provider-owned MA plans has been a trend in recent years, with AllyAlign being a key partner driving and supporting these efforts.

Additionally, health system veteran Mark Price is taking the reins as AllyAlign’s CEO, while founder and former CEO Will Saunders has moved to the president role. Two new members have also joined AllyAlign’s board of directors: Mo Makhzoumi, general partner who heads NEA’s global healthcare investing practice; and Lily Huang, principal at NEA.

NEA is not the only organization contributing to AllyAlign’s $300 million capital infusion. Other investors include Oak HC/FT; Town Hall Ventures; and AllyAlign’s existing investors, Heritage Group and Ziegler.

The investment will allow the company to expand and evolve its model of bringing more value-based care and population health management to senior living and skilled nursing communities, Price told Senior Housing News.

“We’re looking at investments related to adding to our team, investments in technology, and investments in building out our clinical delivery model in a bigger way,” Price told Senior Housing News.

Specifically, the company’s leaders are working with long-term care providers to build clinical delivery models “that provide the right care at the right time, in the right place, for residents,” and keep them out of the emergency room if possible.

“If there’s something that we can do onsite to provide better care and avoid unnecessary adverse events, it’s better for everybody involved, it’s better for their health and it’s better for the overall cost of care,” Price said.

This can take many forms in practice, and is custom-tailored to each community’s needs.

For instance, it could be a clinic located on the campus of a senior living community, like the one the company helped launch at Lakewood, a CCRC managed by LifeSpire of Virginia in Richmond. AllyAlign also launched a similar clinic at a life plan community belonging to Westminster Communities of Florida.

Or, it could take the form of a telemedicine “ecosystem” that allows AllyAlign’s members to stay connected with medical professionals and family members.

“Fundamentally, what we’re doing is we’re bringing in this great clinical model,” Price said. “And the way we’re able to fund this great clinical model is through a value-based care back-end that we’ve set up.”

AllyAlign is also one of the driving forces behind the Perennial Consortium, an operator-owned MA network that launched in 2021. That, too, could be an area of growth.

“We could be looking at new partnerships with other senior living organizations in different parts of the country,” Price added.

Driving this focus on growth is the fact that both Price and AllyAlign see a future where residents increasingly value access to clinical care in the senior housing communities where they live, a view that is also shared by some senior living providers.

“We think that there’s going to be increasing demand from residents and prospective residents for a great onsite clinical offering … and the pandemic, for a variety of reasons, has accelerated that,” Price said. “People are seeing it’s something that can be a differentiator.”

Price is no stranger to the world of health care. He comes to AllyAlign from Intermountain Healthcare, where he worked as president of the Utah-based health system’s Nevada region. He has also collaborated with NEA “for a significant period of time” before coming aboard at AllyAlign.

“AllyAlign is the first and cornerstone [investment] in this space that we’re looking at to build out this model of health care that we want to deliver,” Price said.

The post Medicare Advantage in Senior Living Gets Boost with $300M Investment in AllyAlign appeared first on Senior Housing News.

Source: For the full article please visit Senior Housing News