Today Health2047 Inc. is launching Zing Health, community-focused, physician-led Medicare Advantage plan that addresses social determinants of health (SDOH). Co-founded by Health2047 with experienced entrepreneurs Dr. Eric Whitaker and Dr. Ken Alleyne, Zing Health will initially offer a Medicare Advantage plan built around community and member health outcomes to consumers in the Midwest. With significant seed funding, a passionate and seasoned founding team and major market interest in its community care model—which is focused on delivering care to diverse populations—Zing Health is embarking on a mission to drastically improve health outcomes in populations that are chronically underserved.
Zing Health: Tech-Enabled Community Care Model
Given that 80% of clinical outcomes are attributable to social determinants, Zing Health’s approach acknowledges the importance of understanding a patient’s circumstances outside of a clinical setting and offers a strategic, repeatable model that can scale to match the size of the problem. Zing Health will connect necessary services directly with its customers by placing the patient-physician relationship at the core of its tech-enabled community care model. This approach stresses the importance of understanding social context, nuances of local healthcare systems and an individual’s unique barriers to health and aims to create a health journey with less friction.
Zing Health’s overarching goal is to address the social determinants of health and decrease the burden on both stakeholders—namely patients and physicians. Zing Health designed its Medicare Advantage plan to deliver the things that matter most: a wide array of high-quality services with little-to-no cost for members, a robust over-the-counter formulary, decreasing physician pain points and ease of patient access—often at novel sites like federally qualified health centers.
Personalized Medicare Advantage Plan to Address SDOH
Zing Health’s Medicare Advantage plan can be personalized by each patient and features community ambassadors, care providers and hospitals that are well-equipped to deliver excellent care. Each Zing customer will have access to a local field care team focused on understanding the community’s unique needs. The Zing field team will also embed itself at partner hospitals to coordinate timely procedures and appropriate discharge practices. As part of its collaborative, community-based approach, Zing Health will partner with, and support, local providers and physicians through transparent and more productive relationships that empower them around information and insights. These partnerships will allow Zing to gather data from health assessments and socioeconomic situations that impact health, and use this valuable information to lower health risks for its members and provide physicians with resources to improve population health management.
“We are building a program that is affordable, accessible and repeatable anywhere in the United States,” said Zing Health co-founder and CEO Eric Whitaker. “We will co-locate care teams with community partners to collect real-time, on-the-ground data about our members and help them achieve their best health possible by ensuring they can access convenient, comprehensive care.”
Third Company Spinout for Health2047
Today’s announcement marks Zing Health as the third company to spin out of Health2047, a Silicon Valley business formation and commercialization enterprise launched by the American Medical Association (AMA) in 2016. The company’s first spin out, Akiri, is building a cloud-based, peer-to-peer network to enable trusted data exchange across the complex U.S. healthcare economy. Health2047’s second spinout, First Mile Care, is a preventive chronic care company building an affordable, scalable and sustainable platform to reverse prediabetes.
“Zing Health is uniquely positioned to transform value-based care thanks to its innovative approach, its laser focus on service delivery and its tech-enabled platform that works alongside members and physicians,” said Health2047 CEO Lawrence K. Cohen. “Isolated point solutions in healthcare are not enough – we need effective, transformational change from forward-thinking companies like Zing Health which focus on the entire healthcare ecosystem and address inadequacies, deliver value and produce better outcomes.”
