Leading Community Care Hub picks Cumulus

Bay Aging and VAAACares® have chosen Cumulus for Virginia’s Community Care Hub. The Cumulus platform will be used to process incoming referrals, assign tasks to staff and partners, conduct client assessments, manage care plans, track activities, optimize billing, and monitor performance.

Cumulus will enhance success for clinical and management staff, along with health plan and provider partners. Cumulus is a cloud-based collaboration hub for multidisciplinary teams, enabling organizations and their partners to securely share information, automate workflows, fully optimize closed-loop social care referrals, conduct client assessments, and track outcomes regardless of which IT systems participants are using.

“Cumulus is a strategic choice for Bay Aging and VAAACares®. The Cumulus team understands what we do and how we do it – they have decades of experience working with HCBS programs. And the modern, secure Cumulus collaboration platform will transform how we’re able to add value for our health plan partners, our network of providers and the clients we serve together.”

–Kathy Vesley, Bay Aging CEO & President

The intuitively flexible Cumulus approach makes it easy for partners to participate – by using the hub directly or through interoperability with the Cumulus HL7 FHIR interface. Interoperability was a key factor for VAAACares’ decision. Cumulus embraces interoperability, offering partners multiple options to authenticate, including the HL7 FHIR SMART App Launch profile and the SMART backend service auth profile. Cumulus can also consume patient and referral information from a partners’ HL7 FHIR API.

“We’re thrilled to have been chosen by VAAACares®, one of the country’s premier and most successful Community Care Hubs. The care hub model enables a cutting-edge vision for improving healthcare outcomes by connecting health and social care partners together– the integrated, multidisciplinary approach that inspired the creation of Cumulus.”

–John Byer, Cumulus CEO

VAAACares® was established beginning in 2015 to develop the value proposition of a trusted, high-quality, cost-effective, community-based network for Managed Care Organizations (MCOs) and health systems to meet the Health-Related Social Needs (HRSNs) of their members. With multiple MCO contracts, VAAACares® has become a reliable and sought-after statewide community-based provider. Over 45,000 Medicare and Medicaid patients have been assisted by VAAACares®, to date. For this work, in 2017, VAAACares® received the John A. Hartford Foundation Business Innovation Award.

Cumulus will be used by VAAACares® for programs such as care coordination and transitions of care under multiple payer contracts.

Bay Aging and VAAACares

As Virginia’s Community Care Hub VAAACares® is well positioned to contract with Managed Care Organizations, Health Systems, and other private-pay organizations to provide the much-needed HRSN programs and services critical for people of all ages as Virginia begins its next iteration of integrated Medicaid managed care: Cardinal Care.

Cumulus

Cumulus is the flexible collaboration hub that enables organizations, partners, and provider networks to securely share information, automate workflows among teams, assess clients, streamline social care referrals, and improve outcomes for the people they serve - even when organizations are using different IT systems. Inspired at its inception through work with Aging Ahead, Missouri’s largest Area Agency on Aging, Cumulus enables collaborations like multidisciplinary teams, grant initiatives, Community Care Hubs, ADRCs, elder justice collaboratives, and emergency response coordination.