This was actually announced last month but in case you missed it Molina is purchasing the healthcare management end of Unisys. Their area of market is HMO services in area where they presently may not be available and with the purchase expansion should be pretty rapid and the company has 900 employees at present.
Molina’s core business is with Medicare and heavily with Medicaid. With healthcare services here we are talking about giving financial, business intelligence, etc. types of services that many large companies currently provide. The other side of the coin is to to work and join efforts with Medicaid in states to provide HMO-like services. Now that states have cut back so much on budgets, this will be an interesting move to see how it works and succeeds. Molina is a non profit company so we have no shareholder dividends to worry about.
Last time I wrote about Molina, they have our California Governor “Arnold” there to announce their new agreement and investment from Cisco with telehealth and how they plan to rapidly expand the services. As everyone may remember, United Healthcare has invested hundreds of millions into a telehealth project with Cisco as well and who knows how much premium money goes there. This may work out different and perhaps better, again without having to post dividends and focus on total profits.
Cisco Systems and Molina Healthcare HMO Announce Telemedicine Pilot Program – Long Beach, California
I would also guess that telehealth, if not now, will in the future be impacting Medicaid patients with the ability to have tele-health visits with their doctors. BD
The Long Beach-based company has signed an agreement with Unisys Corp. to acquire its Health Information Management (HIM) business, a move that will soon put Molina in 14 states.
The acquisition, estimated at about $135 million, is expected to close in the first half of this year.
For Molina Healthcare, acquiring the organization that processes information for state Medicaid programs and makes claim payments dovetails well with a health plan that takes care of Medicaid patients in nine states, said Molina CEO and Chairman, Dr. J. Mario Molina.
When acquisition is complete, the 900 or so HIM employees will become employees of Molina Healthcare.
Molina said Friday that the 900 "will remain where they are.
With this move, Molina will be able to go to a state Medicaid agency and offer a range of services, including processing information and eligibility, enrolling patients, offering a nurse advice line and disease management programs.
"We can do a hybrid where it's not really an HMO product but we can deliver some of the HMO services to state patients," Molina said. "It really gives under one roof a full spectrum of services."
About 1.45 million members are served by Molina Healthcare's licensed health plan subsidiaries in California, Florida, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas, Utah and Washington.
Interesting point on Molina. I recently just read something else on them expanding out to five more states. Posted the link below.It's an interesting read...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.healthplanone.com/blog/
A great constructive article will help to understand the issue.
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