Thinking Bigger About What’s Possible in the Home

In-home support has already proven its value to health plans as a powerful way to engage members where it matters most: at home. Members live more independently and engage more confidently in their care when they have in-person help from a trusted individual. As a result, these members show more informed use of healthcare services, have fewer avoidable readmissions, experience meaningful improvements in quality of life, and are more likely to stay with their health plan.

But what if we’ve been thinking too small about what’s possible in the home?

The home is where barriers to engagement, quality outcomes, and preventive care surface every day. When a trusted Papa Pal is present, those barriers become visible—and solvable. Yet too often, the opportunity to turn those moments into targeted, measurable outcomes remains untapped in traditional engagement models.

Papa heralded a new category with in-home support: companion care. We’ve spent the past few years proving it has real, lasting value for our partners. Then, the question became how to operationalize that presence in ways that directly support quality performance, care management, and member engagement goals. 

Where can we go when we think bigger? 

Enter Papa Plus, the next step in Papa’s evolution. Combining trusted companionship with structured, plan-informed quality and engagement pathways, Papa Plus helps plans translate in-home support into real, targeted outcomes aligned to their highest priorities. 

Companionship builds trust. That trust is what makes Papa Plus work. 

Papa Plus pathways were designed around the moments every health plan consistently struggles with: assessments, preventive care, post-discharge follow-up, proactive risk identification, and other instances where engagement and follow-through determine performance. 

With companionship as the foundation, our nationwide network of Papa Pals bring these pathways to life. Each pathway serves as a guided playbook, helping Papa Pals deliver in-person support that drives specific quality and engagement objectives for each member. 

In other words, the pathways amplify the human connection, turning trusted visits into measurable outcomes.

Let’s dive into a few examples. 

HRA completion is a well-known challenge, especially among members who are socially isolated, have higher needs, or are otherwise difficult to reach through digital or telephonic channels.

With in-home support, the HRA becomes an engaging interaction rather than a transactional task—a shift that can help unearth otherwise elusive details.  

In one partner program, Papa connected with members of a Dual-Eligible Special Needs Plan (DSNP) who had previously been considered “unreachable.” Of the members Papa engaged, 41% completed an HRA—something the plan had been unable to achieve through traditional outreach models.

These assessments revealed actionable insights that would have otherwise stayed hidden:

This is the kind of contextual data that directly informs care management, risk stratification, and targeted interventions designed to reduce avoidable utilization. And for many members, these critical insights only surface with a trusted representative in the home. 

The home environment is one of the least visible yet most influential drivers of outcomes and utilization, but traditional models rarely capture these risks in a structured way. As trusted companions in the home, Papa Pals regularly observe day-to-day challenges that might otherwise go unnoticed. In fact, one in four Papa Pals we spoke with for recent in-depth interviews said they “often” or “always” notice a risk to the health, safety, or well-being of members in the home.

With Papa Plus, these observations are now captured through a structured and customizable HSA pathway to proactively surface fall risks, environmental hazards, and other safety concerns.

In one recent program with a national health plan serving Medicaid members in the Southeast, the HSA pathway revealed striking insights:

These risks would have otherwise gone unnoticed. During visits, Papa Pals flag hazards like cluttered walkways, loose rugs, poor lighting, or unsafe stair areas—and go further, taking simple preventative steps: reorganizing frequently used items to reduce reaching or bending, improving lighting, or encouraging mobility aids.

When additional support is needed, Papa connects members to services or resources that further improve safety, turning everyday visits into meaningful, measurable impact.

Closing preventive care gaps is rarely a knowledge issue. More often, it is a follow-through problem. 

Closing preventive care gaps is rarely a knowledge issue. More often, it is a follow-through problem. 

That’s why we naturally see improved preventive care trends among members who have support from a Papa Pal, including a 19% increase in primary care visits and a 6% increase in composite care gap closure rate.

When pathways are activated around annual wellness visits and preventive screenings, Papa Pals are able to reinforce appointment importance, help with scheduling, support transportation logistics, and document completion—amplifying this impact even further.

This transforms outreach from repeated reminders into supported action—particularly impactful for members who struggle with cognitive overload, transportation barriers, or caregiving constraints. It directly supports Star Ratings performance and preventive care trends. 

Health plans understand that transitions of care are one of the highest-risk periods for readmissions and disengagement. Roughly 40% of readmitted members cite home-related challenges as a contributing factor to their readmission. 

That reality underscores the role in-home support can play during recovery. In fact, multiple programs using Papa’s companion care model alone saw readmissions decline by as much as 14% among both Medicare Advantage members and Medicaid members with high ED utilization. 

Imagine what’s possible with a structured pathway in place designed to extend these results even further.

With Papa’s post-discharge pathway, Papa Pals help members prepare their home environment, pick up medications or groceries, coordinate and travel to follow-up appointments, and assist with other tasks that make recovery at home easier.

Plans gain both visibility into barriers and a consistent mechanism to support adherence during recovery. Papa Plus builds on the foundation our companion care model put in place by adding more structure to how plans activate and track post-discharge support, helping ensure members receive the right assistance at the moments they matter most. 

Historically, in-home support has been treated as a standalone member benefit, separate from core quality and care management strategies. Papa Plus integrates those strategies directly into programming, fundamentally broadening the approach from episodic visits to structured engagement around plan-identified goals. 

Instead of isolated visits, in-home interactions align to specific objectives that drive ROI. Now, that same trusted presence that improves quality of life becomes a configurable, insight-rich model that aligns with plan priorities—all built on the human connection members have come to love and appreciate. 

When that connection is paired with structured pathways, in-home engagement stops being a narrow service category and becomes a scalable channel for quality, engagement, and measurable impact. 

It’s time to think bigger about what’s possible when trusted, in-home presence is intentionally designed around the outcomes that matter most to health plans and the members they serve.