Humana is teaming with NowPow to enhance its work to address the social determinants of health in Chicago.

The insurer will deploy NowPow’s community service referral platform for members in its Medicare Advantage and Medicaid plans in the region. Chicago is one of Humana’s designated Bold Goal markets, where it’s making a significant push in population health.

Through the platform, Humana can screen members for social needs and then generate a personalized list of community resources, such as food delivery or social isolation supports, that they can be referred to.

“Humana has a very authentic voice in this work,” Kohler said.

Following a referral, Humana and NowPow will work together to track the results, monitoring member engagement and outcomes following the referrals. The companies said this tracking will allow NowPow to monitor referral gaps to back future network expansion.

Chuck Dow, regional president at Humana and based in Chicago, told Fierce Healthcare that part of why the insurer is confident it will see the payoff in the team-up is that as it was rolling out the platform, Humana learned several of its regional provider partners are also using NowPow.

He said the team got even more excited to roll out the platform as it learned key partners also “see value” in it.

“I think it’s important to go back to the bold goals and where we started in our journey,” Dow said. “It’s something that we’re just really, really excited about.”