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Food security is a key component in establishing healthy eating habits, and health plans can play an important role in equipping members with tools to access healthy foods – something that is needed now more than ever. Here are three key tactics health plans can employ to help members access nutritious food and create conscious lifestyle changes. Paying close attention to social determinants of health, like ability to drive or proximity to a grocery store, can also help predict who is at highest risk of being food insecure which, in turn, can help a plan know which resources to offer to those members. When health plans strategize how to best serve their member base they can create real change in members’ total health and wellbeing which may help make a difference between an ICU visit and a mild Covid-19 case.

Six investors shared their strategies for weathering this storm, and what advice they’re giving portfolio companies: Dennis Depenbusch, director of New Ventures Initiative for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas The New Ventures Initiative is the corporate venture arm of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas, with investments in healthcare technology and population health. Daniel Haders, managing director of healthcare for Nex Cubed and operating partner for Sway Ventures Haders heads up Nex Cubed’s digital healthcare program. I think that there’s going to be some slowdown in the closing of new deals while we get a clarification of what’s going to happen in the market and there’s some market resetting.

The key to improvement across all of these areas lies in ED optimization, and the approach is twofold: it involves improving ED access to critical patient care insights and ensuring care teams are aware, in real time, when their patients present to the ED. As ACOs look to the upcoming Direct Contracting ACO model, proactive ED optimization will continue to play a key role in improving value-based care practices to better help patients—including vulnerable patient populations that may have been previously overlooked. If ACOs expect EDs to assist with identifying avoidable admissions, reducing ED re-visits, and supporting other value-based care goals, ACOs need to make their care insights accessible to ED providers and hospital case managers. The enhanced collaboration yielded a 15 percent reduction in ED utilization, a 7 percent reduction in avoidable ED admissions, and a 13 percent increase in provider engagement scores—resulting in an estimated $6.5 million in saved care costs for the ACO.

From algorithms that predict the success of in-vitro fertilization to fertility benefits programs, women’s reproductive health companies cover a wide swath of health services. Progyny has created a fertility benefits program that gives patients access to a network of provider clinics, a pharmacy for treatments and a fertility expert. Since its big funding round, Advantia has also struck a partnership with West Virginia’s Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) to give women 24/7 lactation support through its Pacify app. The company doesn’t cover the cost of the IVF procedure itself, but its subscription-based fertility plans offer the surrounding services, including fertility tests, medication planning and health coaching with a registered nurse.