Magellan Healthcare and the senior care startup DUOS are taking their partnership to the next level.
This week, Magellan announced the launch of its new Senior Assistance program, powered by DUOS.
The new service will allow Magellan members to get connected with personal assistants — or “Duos” — who focus on members’ social needs to help maximize their independence while aging in place.
The duos will also be able to coordinate community resources for health plan members to make at-home care a more holistic and personalized experience.
Launched in 2021, the New York-based DUOS helps place expert “Duos” into the homes of seniors. The company works directly with consumers as well as with payer and provider organizations.
Magellan Healthcare — the health care arm of Magellan Health Inc., which was acquired by Centene — is a care provider that mainly focuses on solutions for complex conditions for behavioral health and medical specialty treatment.
DUOS started working with Magellen a year ago through a pilot program in order to prove that its services were valuable and effective.
Of the members involved in the pilot, 45% identified themselves as socially isolated some or most of the time, a rate that is 80% higher than the average rate of isolation for older adults.
The Magellen and DUOS pilot resulted in a 93% success rate in addressing members’ social determinants of health needs and an 85% retention rate.
“Based on the success of that pilot, what this contract now gives us is the ability to start selling through the other payers that Magellan does business with,” DUOS CEO Karl Ulfers told Home Health Care News. “We’re going to be bringing to market an employer-based solution that focuses on caregivers, because we know there’s an immense amount of pressure on caregivers. Helping solve these needs for older adults helps take that pressure off of caregivers.”
Through the Senior Assistance program, Magellan members will receive a personalized plan and weekly virtual check-ins to help them meet daily needs and hurdle other barriers that might be in the way as they age in place.
Those barriers often include safe housing, transportation, meals and groceries and health care navigation, among many others.
For DUOS, this partnership is a great opportunity to scale at an even quicker rate than anticipated following their $15 million Series A funding round.
“This gives us incredible scale and opportunity to help as many people as possible,” Ulfers said. “For Magellan, this helps them advance their mission to help older adults from a whole person perspective — in addition to what we can do to help from a mental health and behavioral health standpoint.”
At a macro level, DUOS has the ability to do a lot, Jacques Anderson, co-founder and chief of staff at DUOS, told HHCN. That’s what’s exciting and also challenging about the road ahead.
“There is so much that goes into aging,” Anderson said. “DUOS really aspires to capture and carry members where they’re at and establish a longitudinal relationship throughout their aging process, which I feel like is a lofty, aspirational goal. It’s ambitious, but it’s ambitious on purpose, because aging is a huge issue. We take this very seriously and we’re committed to doing the best job we can to deliver top quality customer experience.”
At the end of the day, DUOS hopes to simplify the complicated nature of at-home care.
“It’s a really complex landscape that older adults face, and so our job is really to simplify that complex landscape,” Ulfers said. “These populations have a really high rate of social isolation. The way that we solve that though is not by just providing them a friend. Our way of solving that is to actually solve these barriers that are resulting in them being isolated.”
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