The Massachusetts-based Devoted Health is an all-in-one health care company that delivers virtual-first care and insurance to primarily Medicare Advantage patients. It’s one of the many payers that has prioritized home-based care as well.

Devoted, founded in 2017 by brothers Todd and Ed Park, was one of the first organizations to popularize the term “payvidor.”

The company delivers in-home care by combining Medicare Advantage coverage with its virtual and in-home care provider — Devoted Medical — as well as partnerships with other home health providers.

The company has seen significant growth recently, boasting a year-over-year increase in membership of over 70%, according to the company. Devoted Health now serves over 140,000 members.

In 2023, Devoted Health also broadened its service footprint, extending its reach to cover a total of 299 counties across 13 states during the last Medicare annual enrollment period.

“In a health care system that isn’t always accessible or easy to navigate, we at Devoted Health are profoundly honored to provide each member with the same quality of care and service we’d want for our own families,” Ed Park, co-founder and CEO of Devoted Health, said in a statement. “It’s deeply gratifying to have so many others believe in the promise of our model, and we’re very excited to bring the love and world-class care that is Devoted to more and more Americans.”

According to Pitchbook, digital health funding remained low in Q3 of 2023, with $800 million in funding and just 60 new deals, both multi-year lows since at least 2020. Deals in the digital health space have been dropping since 2020.

Devoted Health’s $175 million was one of the highest funding rounds of any company, notably trailing Monogram Health’s $375 million Series C funding in January 2023.

The funding will help Devoted expand its reach across the country. It will help bolster its technology, clinical and operational capabilities, according to a company spokesperson.

“This includes continuing to innovate our home health care program and our proprietary technology platform,” the spokesperson said in an email to Home Health Care News. “By offering virtual and in-home care to members that complements the care they receive from their primary care physicians, we can ensure that members get the right care when they need it to keep them healthy.”

As the company has grown, recognition from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has also come in the form of increased star ratings.

In 2023, 94% of all Devoted members in star-eligible plans enrolled in a 4-star, 4.5-star or 5-star plan, according to the company.

Devoted Health was also named to Fortune’s Best Workplaces in Health Care list and its Best Workplaces for Women list.

The funding was led by a lead syndicate made up of The Space Between (TSB), Highbury Holdings, GIC, Stardust Equity, Maverick Ventures and Fearless Ventures

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The Miramar, Florida-based onehome announced Monday that it’s partnering with next-generation MA plan Devoted Health to coordinate and deliver a wide variety of home health services in Arizona, Ohio and San Antonio, Texas. In addition to those markets, onehome’s current footprint also includes Florida and New York, Dr. Joe Mayer, the company’s president, told Home Health Care News.

“We’re in a pretty rapid expansion mode, given the tailwinds [behind in-home care] and our partners wanting to do more in the home,” Mayer said. “We’re expecting to be in a number of more markets before the end of the year.”

In many ways, onehome purposely blurs the lines between the traditional convener and provider.

Similar to most conveners, onehome teams up with payers by entering into full-risk capitation agreements for skilled home health care, durable medical equipment (DME) and home infusion services. Instead of exclusively focusing on utilization and network management, however, onehome also delivers the actual home-based care themselves through its vertically integrated provider portfolio.

In other words, the company is an at-risk provider that’s overlaid with convener-like capabilities, Mayer explained.

“Rather than being what I would call a middleman, managing a network, doing utilization management, re-contracting with national providers, we are a vertically integrated provider,” he said. “We’ve got our own home health agencies, our own 40,000-square-foot DME warehouse in the markets we’re in. We’ve got our own fleet of vehicles. We’ve got our own pharmacies.”

Meanwhile, Devoted Health is the Waltham, Massachusetts-based MA plan that launched in October 2018. Even then, the MA startup — one of the first organizations to popularize the term “payvidor” — had publicly discussed how it was prioritizing the home to lower costs and achieve improved health outcomes.

Devoted Health has raised more than $812 million since its formation, with financial backers including venture capital powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz and Frist Cressey Ventures, the health care investor whose other partnerships include Monogram Health and Ready.

The fast-growing MA plan was founded by brothers Ed and Todd Park. Before starting Devoted Health, Ed Park previously served as Athenahealth’s COO and chief technology officer, while Todd Park served as U.S. chief technology officer under the Obama administration and co-founded both Athenahealth and Castlight Health (NYSE: CSLT).

“Our members’ health and quality of life depend on access to safe and necessary care, and, increasingly, we are looking to the home as the best environment for healing,” Ed Park, now Devoted’s CEO, said in a statement. “We’ve partnered with onehome to deliver their high level of care as we expand into Arizona, Ohio and Texas, confident that the unique model they’ve built and their proven track record of moving post-acute care into the home couldn’t be of greater value at this time for serving the needs of our new members.”

Devoted Health did not respond to an HHCN request for comment.

A big differentiator

Initially, the partnership between Devoted Health and onehome will include about 3,500 MA enrollees across their three markets. That figure will likely increase in months to come, as the two partners are already in talks about launching in even more markets as Devoted Health and onehome each grow.

In total, onehome managed just under 1 million lives across its footprint, according to Mayer. Of those individuals, about 100,000 or so will actually need home health, DME or home infusion services annually.

A big differentiator for onehome is the fact it essentially has zero Medicare fee-for-service volume, mostly contracting with “a nice blend” of Medicare Advantage and managed Medicaid, Mayer noted.

“Even though we have these agencies that are licensed under Medicare and Medicaid, we’re not … actually out there marketing for orders or billing Medicare beyond what we have to do to maintain our license, which is a few cases a year,” he said. “We’re able to just get this really tight, really clinically oriented relationship between the provider and the risk-bearing entity.”

The newer direct-contracting models created by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) under the Primary Care First initiative have presented other opportunities of late.

Broadly, direct contracting allows CMS-approved direct-contracting entities (DCEs) to bear varying degrees of risk to manage certain populations. There are three direct-contracting models overall, with each designed to theoretically reduce the cost of care in traditional Medicare with a more value-based approach.

“I think the future is here, in the sense that we’re already launching with a few DCEs,” Mayer said. “And I think our model is uniquely well-suited for partnering with the DCEs.”

CMS recently announced it has suspended the application process for the second year of the direct-contracting models. That won’t affect onehome’s plans in the present, as it is simply focused on getting its current DCE relationships right before considering any further work in that payment environment.

“I’ve almost had to put some of those guys on hold because it’s such a new program,” Mayer said. “We want to ramp up and do it the right way with these first couple partners who we’ve already signed up.”

A new kind of provider

After working as a physician at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, Mayer founded a health care IT company called Cureatr, which he eventually sold. After doing so, he partnered with a PE company called WayPoint Capital Partners to build a new kind of post-acute care provider.

The objective, he recalled, was to create something similar to ChenMed or Oak Street Health (NYSE: OSH), but with the core of the company being home-based post-acute care instead of primary care.

“We kind of took a page out of that playbook and said, ‘Let’s, you know, look at what’s working really well as far as value-based care in primary care,’” Mayer said. “Then let’s apply that model in the home-based care and post-acute care space.”

Mayer and WayPoint looked at about a dozen organizations seeking the right platform investment, then discovered onehome — what was then a four-year-old company — toward the end of 2018.

“We kind of had that ‘ah ha’ moment, because their model was pretty unique,” Mayer said. “It was very forward-thinking. So we — myself and WayPoint Capital Partners — recapitalized the business and partnered with the founders.”

Moving forward, other up-and-coming MA plans will likely seek out home-based care providers like onehome with greater frequency in effort to win market share from the six big national players. Despite the emergence of several MA “disruptors,” UnitedHealthcare, Humana and CVS Health alone control more than half of the MA market.

More than 40% of Medicare-eligible beneficiaries are enrolled in an MA plan in 2021, up from 32% just five years ago, according to data from The Chartis Group.

Smaller MA plans partnering with in-home care innovators isn’t just about winning market share, though. It’s also a necessity, as in-home care often helps plans lower their per member per month (PMPM) costs.

“If you’re getting started with a relatively small number of members, the admin costs to medical-expense costs, the PMPM ratio, it’s much higher,” Mayer said. “So you have to innovate, you have to do things that are going to help you manage the cost of care better.”

That’s exactly what onehome expects to do with Devoted Health moving forward.

The opportunity to build something with Devoted from the ground up is particularly compelling, Mayer added.

“Historically, we’ve come into a market where the payer was already established, had a lot of members, had a big, fragmented network of disparate home health providers, DME, infusion,” he said. “And it’s sort of more like fixing or righting the ship, then being able to do all the more exciting clinical programs, the value-based [initiatives].”

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Much of that feeling came from watching Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM). The Louisville, Kentucky-based health insurer teamed up with TPG Capital and Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe to acquire Kindred at Home in July of that year, with the trio then completing a deal for Curo Health Services less than two weeks later.

After Humana signaled its intent to “own the home,” many believed its peers would inevitably do the same. When Medicare Advantage (MA) organization Devoted Health launched in 2018, co-founder Ed Park even touted that very specific mission.

“We are on a mission to deliver to our members the kind of care that we all would want for our own family,” Park said at the time. “To do that, we have started from a clean sheet of paper, building a ‘payvidor’ — a combination of a ‘payor’ and ‘provider’ of health care services — that in addition to partnering with the most trusted doctors and hospitals, will be a provider of care services in the home designed to help keep our members healthy.”

In some ways, this strategy felt like health care’s version of Manifest Destiny. Payers were destined to aggressively expand into providers’ territory, especially around the home.

Fast-forward to 2021: That trend never really played out in full force.

Plenty of payers have spent millions of dollars investing in at-home care services since 2018, but not at the levels that many experts anticipated. Similarly, some of the large national insurers have made a handful of key acquisitions, though arguably none with the size or significance of Kindred at Home and Curo Health Services.

The COVID-19 pandemic is changing that, however, and payers once again have their sights set on the home.

Looking for a bottom-line boost

Health insurers posted astronomical profits early on in 2020, as many of their members were delaying care due to the public health emergency. But as coronavirus-related costs and hospitalization figures started to rise, many of those same insurers saw their financials dip.

While Humana remained firmly in the black for 2020 overall, it reported a roughly $274 million loss in the fourth quarter, for example. Centene Corporation (NYSE: CNC) posted a loss of about $12 million, largely attributable to higher-than-expected costs related to COVID-19 testing and treatment.

“Early in 2020, we told you the year would be choppy,” Centene CEO Michael Neidorff said during the company’s Q4 earnings call. “And it was.”

Of all the national insurers, Cigna (NYSE: CI) was the most profitable in the fourth quarter, bringing in $4.1 billion in earnings for the quarter. Still, its profit numbers fell short of Wall Street expectations.

CVS Health (NYSE: CVS) ended the fourth quarter of 2020 with $973 million in profit, down roughly 44% compared to $1.7 billion in Q4 2019. Anthem Inc. (NYSE: ANTM) ended the fourth quarter with profits of $551 million, similarly down 41% from $934 million in Q4 2019.

On its end, UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH) reported a profit of $2.2 billion in the fourth quarter of last year. That was down by about 38% compared to $3.5 billion in the same period in 2019.

“We remain in a time of unprecedented challenges for individuals, employers and the health system broadly, particularly for front-line clinicians, including our own,” UnitedHealth Group CEO David Wichmann said during a Q4 earnings call. “Health systems across the world have been — and continue to be — stressed.”

Lots of things factor into these companies’ bottom lines, but hospitalizations are usually one of the top costs for insurers. That’s certainly been true during the COVID-19 crisis, statistics from Avalere Health suggest.

Overall, in-patient COVID-19 hospitalizations could cost the U.S. health care system between $9.6 billion and $16.9 billion in 2020, according to Avalere. The Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm projects commercial payers to shoulder the bulk of that load, footing between $5.6 billion and $9.9 billion of the bill.

One of the best ways to avoid skyrocketing hospital costs is to invest big in home-based care.

An ‘essential’ part of health care’s future

Many of the national insurers have publicly outlined their plans to double down on the home.

Unsurprisingly, Humana has been the busiest, most recently teaming up with DispatchHealth to offer advanced hospital-level care in the home. Its home-focused moves since the start of last year also include a $100 million investment in physician house call group Heal.

Cigna hasn’t been as active, but it too has talked about the importance of the home.

“There were … a number of accelerating trends that will further drive fundamental changes in health care [in 2020],” CEO David Cordani said during Cigna’s Q4 earnings call. “We see care access rapidly changing as a result of consumer behavior, and technology and data innovation leading to growing use of virtual visits and coordinated home-based care all aided by advancements in remote monitoring as well.”

Meanwhile, CVS Health has spent the past few years building a “home health hub.” Part of that mission included partnering with Aloe Care to launch “Symphony,” a medical-alert system that is designed to keep seniors safe and connected at home.

“You can almost imagine how the future of these home health hubs for seniors really integrates with mechanisms that address social determinants of health,” Adam Pellegrini, SVP of enterprise virtual care and consumer health at CVS Health, previously told Home Health Care News.

CVS Health additionally invested more than $114 million in affordable housing last year.

UnitedHealth Group could be on the brink of making the biggest home-based care splash in the near term. Citing “sources familiar with the situation,” M&A intelligence service Mergermarket reported in February that UnitedHealth’s Optum has plans to acquire comprehensive in-home care organization Landmark for an enterprise value of $3.5 billion.

Adding Landmark would assuredly complement Optum’s “Housecalls” program and existing “Optum At-Home” infrastructure. The company’s advanced practice clinicians plan to conduct 2 million in-home visits in 2021.

Like Cordani, Wichmann touched on the value of the home during UnitedHealth’s Q4 earnings call.

“Seniors choose our offerings because of the value they receive, better health outcomes and experiences at lower costs,” he said. “We have also been enhancing our offerings to better meet expectations about how people want to live their lives, focusing on more digital and physical care resources in the home, expanding our one-on-one concierge navigation services, and enabling the home as the safest and more effective setting of care.”

These remarks and seemingly countless others just like them echo that 2018 sense of Manifest Destiny.

It may be a bit later than expected, but 2021 could very well be the year of the “payvidor.”

“Offering a foundational ability to care for people in their homes is essential to developing a health system that is more consumer centric, higher quality and lower cost,” Wichmann said.

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The move could set up interesting technology opportunities with future home care partners down the road.

While home care partnerships aren’t explicitly part of this news for Devoted Health, many MA plans have begun forming such inroads to better care for chronically ill members in the home setting. Plans began doing so in 2019 after the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) changed supplemental benefits rules in 2018.

Even more plans are projected to do so in 2020, thanks to additional CMS moves this year.

“We are pleased that CMS agrees that there is a wide variety of ways that older Americans can keep healthy, including fitness and nutrition classes, and activity monitoring devices such as the Apple Watch,” Kenneth Baer, a spokesman for Devoted Health, told HHCN in an emailed statement. “We are thrilled to be the first Medicare Advantage plan to collaborate with Apple … Using innovative technologies to improve the quality of care is core to our mission.”

Founded in 2017 by co-founders Ed and Todd Park, Devoted Health is a Medicare Advantage plan with 3,000 members and more than 200 employees across offices in Waltham, Massachusetts, and Miramar, Florida. The startup has had plenty of firepower to work with, having raised more than $360 million overall.

As part of Devoted Health’s coverage, the MA plan will cover up to $150 off the cost of an Apple Watch for its beneficiaries annually, CNBC reported.

Devoted Health and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) teaming up should come as no surprise to those who have observed the tech giant over the last few years. Apple has steadily added features to its devices aimed at senior care.

Last year, for example, the company added a fall detection feature to its Apple Watch Series 4. Meanwhile, its Apple Watch Series 5 offers specialized heart-monitoring features.

In addition to Devoted Health, Apple has reportedly been in talks with other private Medicare plans in pursuit of similar deals.

If Apple teams up with more MA plans, especially ones already contracting with home care providers, it could be a game-changer for agencies, basically allowing them to better track their client’s progress in the home in a turnkey remote-patient-monitoring capacity.

Many providers are open to the use of technology in the home, but questions surrounding reimbursement for devices and services still exist — though that’s is slowly changing.

For instance, Cincinnati-based FirstLight Home Care launched its own telehealth service using remote patient monitoring in early 2019.
“This partnership opens up new avenues of care that will allow us to add to our already excellent caregiving services,” FirstLight CEO Jeff Bevis previously told HHCN. “Our partnership with [HNC Virtual Solutions] is going to allow us to connect patients to clinicians using remote patient monitoring, which studies have shown can lead to enhanced quality of life, fewer hospital visits and more involvement from family members.”

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Plans’ newfound ability to offer supplemental benefits such as home care and transportation for certain beneficiaries is drawing a number of new players into the space, many of whom are poised to create disruption.

In fact, there have been at least 16 new MA plan entrants this Annual Election Period (AEP), according to Patrick Phillips, CEO of Cavulus. 

Hilton Head, South Carolina-based Cavulus is a technology firm that caters specifically to the Medicare Advantage industry, providing plans solutions for marketing, sales, compliance and more.

More so than traditional payers like Humana, Aetna and others, MA startups are able to take risks in the home care realm, going after innovative offerings for beneficiaries and partnerships with providers. That’s one reason the startups are on track to revolutionize the industry, Phillips said. 

HHCN recently connected with Phillips to get his take on disruption in MA and where home-based care fits into the picture. 

You can find the rest of HHCN’s conversation with Phillips below, edited for length and clarity.

HHCN: Can you give me a little background on how Cavulus got started and what it’s goals are?

Phillips: I stood up the company following the Medicare Modernization Act back in 2004, when reimbursement rates hit a point that Medicare Advantage became profitable for the private health plan industry.

There was a lot of growth in Medicare Advantage plans being stood up and, obviously, enrollment coming into those plans. With that came a heightened level of regulation.

I really focused our technology and our research and development on ensuring protection for the senior population on how they were being sold and marketed to coming into Medicare Advantage plans.

That was an easy sell into the health plan vertical. [Plans] wanted to make sure they were operating in a compliant fashion so they didn’t receive stiff penalties and fines related to unethical sales tactics. 

Cavulus technology provides transparency in the field. That’s done in a real-time fashion and reported back to regulators and the compliance division within health plans so they know exactly what was communicated to beneficiaries. 

Everything is documented, from the first piece of marking they receive to what they inquired about to make sure [seniors] weren’t sold into the idea that a certain [benefit] was covered or a certain physician was in the PCP network — so there is an ease of enrollment and also [a record] for rapid disenrollment.

We [also] built a conduit to allow for member services to have full visibility on all the marketing an individual receives.

We’re touching about 25% of the lives in Medicare Advantage currently.

Talk about what you’ve seen in the past year since CMS first allowed MA plans to offer these in-home supplemental benefits, which previously weren’t covered.   

There are a number of new startup plans coming into the space. I’ve interacted with just about every one of them at this point. They really are poised to disrupt what has been going on with incumbent players — a lot of the existing health plans that had been in the space.

MA was never the golden, profitable aspect of their organizations, and that’s kind of [changed] over the past three or four years. MA is now one of the most profitable aspects of what insurers are offering.

New permitted benefit designs are really opening up doors for plans that are creative enough to leverage some of these new regulations in their benefit design. That’s what we’re seeing a lot of the new start ups grab hold of. 

There’s a handful of plans that have made news, especially financial news with the valuations they’ve been given and the money they’ve raised. That’s namely Devoted Health, Oscar Health and Clover Health. Oscar and Clover are backed by the Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

[They] really are technology-focused health plans. They all started out focused on the Affordable Care Act, but as that lost political support with the current administration, they really refocused on Medicare Advantage. And they are expanding their service areas pretty dramatically. 

Solace Health is another startup that’s very well funded and nimble in that they don’t have a health plan culture established yet, which is typically very bureaucratic and slow moving.

These plans can position themselves to be member-centric from the start and leverage technology to allow more direct interactions under a variety of different sales, marketing and enrollment channels — and also in designing their benefits in a more creative way.

Ride sharing companies [like] Lyft are now permitted to be baked into a Medicare Advantage benefit design. Mobile nursing units, in home visits and virtual monitoring — these are [also] things that are now being packaged and offered in.

These new plans are very well positioned to capitalize on this and leverage those new aspects of what CMS is permitting. 

How do you think these tech-focused startups will disrupt the MA industry?

Right out of the gates, I think it will be like with any other industry: Customer service for seniors when they inquire with some of the newer players will be vastly different than some of the experiences they have with incumbents.

We’re seeing more growth in the MA space with startups than we are with service area expansions among some of the larger players.

I know there are 16 new entrants this Annual Election Period (AEP).

Do new in-home benefits play an important role in this increased interested in the MA space? 

Oh, absolutely. First and foremost, utilization of benefits will increase dramatically when you have in-home monitoring and in-home nurse visits.

When you have an incapacitated beneficiary who has no way of really getting to a doctor’s office or the pharmacy … they’re often reluctant to get things filled or go to the doctor. 

What advice would you have for home-based care companies hoping to get involved with an MA plan?

It’s not unlike how we view winning relationships with Medicare Advantage plans.

It’s those that have a focus on adopting newer technologies to deliver care. Plans need to be willing to make that investment and make sure their members have adequate access to either a computer or an iPad or a cell phone that’s capable of providing some of these in-home monitoring technologies. 

One great thing about MA plans is that they all need to file their plan designs in the middle of the summer. There’s some level of visibility on exactly what these plans are doing and where they’re making their investments.

[Find] the plans that are more innovative in what they’re offering and [are] making some level of technological investment.  

With the telemedicine movement, we’re at the tip of the iceberg with that right now. That’s a huge disruptor in Medicare Advantage because we’re talking about a population that is not as mobile in getting around anymore.

The sky is the limit on how disruptive that can be in the future.

One thing that we’ve heard from bigger players is that it’s hard to offer a slew of new in-home benefits because there’s no additional money to make it happen. Is that less of a problem for these newer startups because they’re starting from scratch?  

Of course.

[Traditional MA plans] have baked in a lot of nonsensical benefits that their populations are accustomed to, even if there’s zero utilization of those benefits. Taking benefits away that the member population is accustomed to seeing can be detrimental.

These larger, incumbent plans are often stuck in the mud with things they’ve piecemealed on over the years.

One big movement is Silver Sneakers, or any gym membership that MA covers. The utilization of those benefits is miniscule but they’re already baked into a lot of these plans.

The other thing is a lot of these larger plans suffer from a culture that doesn’t allow them to move very quickly. The redesign of a benefit program is a Herculean effort for the actuaries and underwriters of a health plan.

Starting from scratch every year to do what’s most attractive to the market is an exercise that’s not always done from a standing start. It’s often templated year after year.

These new plans can read the tea leaves and create a benefit design that strikes a chord with those that are shopping this year.

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The Waltham, Massachusetts-based company officially launched Tuesday by enrolling eligible MA members across eight counties in south and central Florida. In addition to launching, Devoted Health also announced the raising of $300 million during its series B funding round, bringing its total funding to at least $362 million since forming in March 2017.

The series B round was led by Menlo Park, California-based private venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, with additional investment coming from Premji Invest, Uprising and existing investors.

As part of its business model, Devoted Health is looking to serve as both health care payor and provider, CEO and co-founder Ed Park said. The startup is specifically eyeing home-based care services to simultaneously achieve lower costs and improved health outcomes.

Currently, those services include clinician house-calls for high-risk patients.

“We are on a mission to deliver to our members the kind of care that we all would want for our own family,” Park, who co-founded Devoted Health with his brother, Todd Park, said in a statement. “To do that, we have started from a clean sheet of paper, building a ‘payvidor’ — a combination of a ‘payor’ and ‘provider’ of health care services — that in addition to partnering with the most trusted doctors and hospitals, will be a provider of care services in the home designed to help keep our members healthy.”

Before starting Devoted Health, Ed Park previously served as Athenahealth (Nasdaq: ATHN) COO and chief technology officer. Devoted Health Executive Chairman Todd Park served as U.S. chief technology officer under the Obama administration and co-founded Athenahealth, as well as Castlight Health (NYSE: CSLT).

Devoted Health declined Home Health Care News’ requests for comment.

Next-generation MA plans

Devoted Health describes itself as a “next-generation” Medicare Advantage plan and says it has received all necessary approvals from Florida and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to begin enrolling members in Sunshine State.

As an MA plan, Devoted Health will be responsible for the full cost of care for its members, giving the startup a serious incentive to keep them healthy. Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader and health care entrepreneur Bill Frist is among Devoted Health’s backers.

Besides his political background Frist is also the co-founder of Nashville-based Aspire Health, which was one of the country’s largest non-hospice, community palliative care providers. Major MA player Anthem, Inc. (NYSE: ANTM) acquired Aspire in June for an undisclosed amount.

Roughly one in three people with Medicare are enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan. Along with consumers, home care agencies are also targeting MA plans, which in 2019 will be able to provide certain non-medical home-based care services as supplemental benefits for the first time.

Devoted Health may have raised a significant amount of funding in its early days, but the startup is not without competition in the next-gen MA market. Oscar Health, backed by Google parent company Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOGL), is also hoping to make Medicare Advantage a big part of its business.

New York City-based Oscar Health announced in August that Alphabet Inc. planned to invest $375 million into company. Oscar Health also offers a 24-7 doctor call service for its members.

Devoted Health plans to use the series B funding to further develop its technology and expand its team. Its launch and funding announcements come as the Medicare open enrollment period is in full-swing, remaining open until Dec. 7, 2018.

Medicare plan coverage for 2019 begins Jan. 1 of next year.

“More than 10,000 Americans are turning 65 every day, and they are entering a health care system that is not just confusing and complicated, but also often cold and impersonal,” Vijay Pande, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz joining the board of directors of Devoted Health, said in a statement. “We believe that the Devoted Health team has the experience and expertise to drive truly meaningful and scalable change in how health care is financed and delivered — from payment models to the patient experience and the technology needed to make it happen.”

Written by Robert Holly

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