Addressing social needs amid the COVID-19 pandemic: A survey of dual eligible special needs plans

COVID-19 has hit some populations harder than others. This includes people of color, residents of nursing facilities and other congregate settings, and individuals with multiple chronic medical conditions. People in these groups are often dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid because they have a disability or are age 65 or older, and also have low incomes. Recent federal data show that dually eligible individuals are more likely to contract COVID-19 than Medicare-only beneficiaries and are hospitalized with COVID-19-related complications more than four times as often.

Dually eligible individuals also frequently have significant social risk factors, which if addressed, could improve their access to care, health outcomes, and quality of life. With support from Arnold Ventures, the Center for Health Care Strategies recently partnered with the Association for Community Affiliated Plans (ACAP) to examine how its Dual Eligible Special Needs Plan (D-SNP) members were addressing their enrollees’ social risk factors.

As a supplement to this work, ACAP and CHCS explored how ACAP-member plans, including D-SNPs and Medicare-Medicaid Plans (MMPs), are addressing existing and new social risk factors of their dually eligible enrollees during the pandemic. Information from 14 plans was collected in an October 2020 survey. This blog shares the survey results.