The Helper Bees Expands into Medicare Advantage with healthAlign Acquisition

• National brands combine to create an aging-in-place solution, offering access to a full spectrum of in-home service providers through a single platform, which provides scalability for future innovation
• Creating a tech-enabled solution to convene the nation’s home care providers and payers, including long-term care insurance (LTCI), Medicare Advantage (MA), and Medicaid
• Providing innovative technology and personalized service through teams of nurses, care managers, caregivers, researchers, and data scientists to empower aging in place through timely and personalized interventions

The Helper Bees (THB), an insurtech company creating a better model for home-based care, today announced the acquisition of healthAlign. Together the two companies will drive aging-in-place innovation by centralizing a full range of in-home services within a single platform; fulfilling through national and local providers, regulated agencies, and tech-enabled caregiver solutions; and synchronizing a bidirectional data stream across every member touchpoint from the home.

healthAlign emerged as an industry leader in 2019, earning one of the first contracts for the newly formed Medicare Advantage in-home supplemental benefits. By 2020, the company managed over one-third of all in-home support benefits offered, including home modification, transportation, meal delivery, and in-home care. The Helper Bees is a pioneer of data-backed products for the Long-term Care Insurance industry, providing carrier partners with the first comprehensive aging-in-place care management program, tech-enabled caregiver matching, and the most robust in-home data analytics.

“More seniors are aging in place than ever before, but to date, payers have lacked the ability to unify all services brought into the home of their insureds,” said The Helper Bees CEO and Co-founder Dr. Char Hu. “By combining human expertise and data science, The Helper Bees’ new, augmented platform offers a single pane of glass view into all services, risks and benefits. While this is important to solving challenges right now, the creation of this platform enables the integration of all new aging-in-place technology. This creates a future-proof model for remaining in the home through a unified care journey.”

According to AARP, nearly 90% of people over the age of 65 prefer to stay at home as long as possible. In order to support this, health plans must manage an influx of varied home-based services. These services, in turn, must be addressed by a large network of providers, from nurses to claims agents. 

According to healthAlign data, even the largest national providers can rarely fulfill more than 15-20% of in-home service needs.  But in bringing together the power of many providers, healthAlign helps payers ensure quality fulfillment for their members at home. Throughout the pandemic, fulfillment of home-based care became increasingly important for many of the largest payers including Medicare, Medicaid, and Long-term Care Insurance. Combining The Helper Bees and healthAlign brings to these payers a new set of scalable solutions.

“From a patient, payer, and public policy perspective — everyone generally favors care in the home. But there are also quality, logistics, and fulfillment challenges that come with trying to organize a diverse range of in-home services,” said Andy Friedell, founder and CEO of healthAlign. “Our homeAlign™ platform helps solve those challenges. Now together with The Helper Bees, we look forward to bringing a wider range of solutions to our respective clients as well as a broader mix of opportunities to our in-home provider partners.” 

The healthAlign team helped reduce hospital readmissions by over 60% and in-payment spending by over 35%. Now, combined with The Helper Bees’ Virtual Nurse Assessments, Care Concierge, and Digital Invoicing offerings, a comprehensive end-to-end platform comes into being, just in time to help seniors receive the best available care—at home.