Our Health Plans Just Expanded in a Big Way. See What That Means!
Just recently, VNS Heath took a big step towards making our Top Company Objective of leading New York State in integrated long-term care a reality. Here’s the story…
Top Company Objective featured in this article: Lead New York State in integrated long-term care (MAP).
Spotlighted team: Health Plans
Our Top Company Objective in Action: In late January, our Medicaid MLTC (Managed Long Term Care) health plan joined forces with iCircle, an MLTC plan that spans 30 upstate counties. The iCircle MLTC plan has approximately 4,700 members, who, on April 1st, will become members of our MLTC unless they choose another plan. With this transition, our MLTC plan will now be offered in 55 out of New York State’s 62 counties.
Why it matters: iCircle has MLTC members in 30 New York State counties—including 17 where our plans were not previously available. So we’ll now have MLTC members in 17 new counties, plus more saturation across our existing MLTC presence in Western New York!
The opportunity: With our MLTC plan now expanded to 55 counties, this gives us more counties that our Total plan could potentially expand into—since our MLTC presence makes it easier for our Total plan to get approval from New York’s Department of Health to operate in these counties.
The big picture: Fully integrated Medicaid Advantage Plus (MAP) plans like our VNS Health Total plan, which combine Medicare and Medicaid long-term care benefits in a single plan, represent the future when it comes to ensuring that New Yorkers who are “dual eligible” (eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid) receive the most comprehensive and coordinated coverage and care.. For this reason, New York State is encouraging eligible New Yorkers to migrate from stand-alone Medicaid MLTC plans to these integrated plans.
Driving Toward Our 3-year Strategic Goals: As of today, our Health Plans—MLTC, Total, EasyCare, EasyCare Plus, and SelectHealth—have over 85,000 members. This number represents an important step towards our goal of having 100,000 patients, members and clients in our care on any given day by the end of this year.
To read Home Care Magazine’s reporting on this VNS Health/iCircle partnership, click here.
