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Sergey Nivens
Alana Healthcare has transformed itself in recent years from a durable medical equipment company to a disease management company, a transformation the Nashville Business Journal has written about before.
This summer, the company took another step forward in that pivot via a new partnership with Nashville-based Cigna-HealthSpring, through which Alana will help the Medicare Advantage provider treat patients suffering from complex respiratory disease states like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, known commonly as COPD.
Earlier this week, I sat down with Alana COO Jordan Schneider and Robert Coxe, senior medical director with Cigna-HealthSpring, to talk about the partnership, what it says about Alana’s transformation and why COPD patients are an important area of focus for both the payer and Alana. The following are highlights from our conversation:
First and foremost, how’s Alana’s transition going?
Schneider: Alana’s transition’s gone great, better than we would have expected. … Over the last two and a half years, we’ve expanded now our initial home CROM-based offering [Comprehensive Respiratory Outcome Management] for highly-acute patients in their homes to … transitional care centers with facilities along the East Coast, in multiple states. We’ve expanded our home CROM program to, I believe, 10 states at this point in time. We’ve got about 900 patients in that program, so it’s grown quite a bit, which has led us to really a full-disease management model, which is what we’ve partnered with [Cigna-HealthSpring] on.
What’s each group’s role in this partnership?
Eleanor Kennedy covers Nashville’s health care and technology industries.