SCAN Group Acquires The Residentialist Group to Further Build Its Home-Based Care ‘Thesis’

The SCAN Group announced on Thursday that it has acquired The Residentialist Group (TRG), an organization that provides chronic disease management, palliative care and home-based care to seniors.

The deal is noteworthy because it marks the first time the organization has acquired an outside company. SCAN declined to disclose financial terms of the deal.

“A few years ago, as our board was doing a strategic refresh, there was an acknowledgement that there are many ways to keep seniors healthy and independent,” Dr. Sachin Jain, president and CEO of SCAN Group and SCAN Health Plan, told Home Health Care News. “Medicare Advantage is one way to do that, but it’s by no means the only way. We wanted to find other ways to keep seniors healthy and independent. A big part of that has been an acknowledgement that home-based care delivery is an important [solution].”

Advertisement

The SCAN Group is a nonprofit organization focused on helping senior citizens stay healthy and independent. Founded in 1977, Long Beach, California-based SCAN Health Plan is one of the nation’s largest not-for-profit Medicare Advantage plans, serving more than 270,000 members.

As an organization, TRG largely served Medicare Advantage plans and medical groups. Annually, TRG serves about 25,000 patients in California and Pennsylvania. The acquisition extends SCAN’s footprint into the Pennsylvania market.

TRG was an attractive acquisition target because of its history with SCAN and the cultural alignment between the two organizations, Jain said.

Advertisement

“TRG is in our backyard,” he said. “We have a long history of contracting with TRG to provide services to SCAN members. Their founder, Dr. Norman Vinn, really built an organization that’s focused on delivering high quality care to people in their homes. I think we saw a real cultural alignment between what TRG was built to do and what SCAN aspires to do. In many ways, it felt like a truly natural fit.”

SCAN will merge TRG with its home-based care program – HealthCHEC – in order to form Homebase Medical, which will serve SCAN Health Plan members and, for the first time, members of other health plans.

Homebase Medical will focus on palliative care, chronic disease management, care transition management and personal health assessments in the home.

Increasingly driving care into the home, and recognizing the many ways this can be accomplished, has been a big part of the organization’s thesis.

Homebase Medical is just one of the many ways SCAN is expanding its home-based care delivery offerings, according to Jain.

“Welcome Health is our primary care subsidiary, which we launched last year,” he said. “myPlace Health is our PACE entity which will be critical to keeping seniors healthy and independent. We launched that earlier this year in collaboration with Commonwealth Care Alliance. Recognizing that for many unfortunate individuals, the streets is their home — we started an entity called Healthcare in Action. It provides home-based medical care for people experiencing homelessness.”

Along with the acquisition announcement, SCAN has named Dwight Brown CEO of Homebase Medical. Before this, he was CEO of Bluewater Home Care, a Los Angeles-based home care agency he founded.

Additionally, Dr. Archita Sood was named chief medical officer. Most recently, she served as the regional medical officer and director of palliative care at CareMore Health.

Companies featured in this article:

, ,