New enhancements to the Amino platform are here

Whether it’s through a self-service app, reaching out to a call center, or hearing recommendations straight from a provider’s mouth, we believe patients should have access to fast, reliable, validated recommendations that show them the lowest cost, highest quality providers and facilities available to them. 

Amino Health is constantly finding new ways to improve the member experience as we venture forward on our path to be the engine that powers care recommendations at every point in a patient’s healthcare journey. 

In this next evolution of the Amino platform you’ll find new features that enhance search capabilities across a wider range of care needs, enhancing plan members - and the care coordinators who support them - to quickly and reliably find the highest value care options, whether they be providers and facilities or third-party point solutions.

Here’s what you need to know:

We’ve expanded our data coverage to support more specialist searches

This release doubles the number of medical specialties supported and now spans more than 80 specialties, 39K facilities, and 3M providers. 

A primary focus of this release was supporting an even wider range of care needs, providing broad data coverage for search queries, enabling members to find care for all shoppable needs in one, intuitive tool.  In 2022, 70% of activity on the platform was searches for provider categories or specializations, like "primary care physician" or "dermatologist," with the remaining 30% spread across condition-driven searches and researching providers and facilities by name. We’ve prioritized adding those specialties that are in the highest demand, particularly as patients revisit long-deferred routine care. Today, members can search for and find care across entirely new categories of clinicians like podiatrists, acupuncturists, physical therapists and dietitians. 

We’ve increased access to primary care

Increasing access to primary care is paramount to health outcomes and cost reduction. In fact, studies show that engaging in annual visits with a primary care provider leads to 19% lower odds of premature death and 33% savings on healthcare costs. 

With this release, Amino added more than 500K Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants, who increasingly serve as primary care providers as doctors book months in advance due to high demand.  

In addition to being guided to the best provider in a speciality, these enhancements ensure patients are guided to the most appropriate site for service and category of care. New functionality also re-routes members back into primary care when that provides a more appropriate, affordable, and accessible provider or site for care. For example, in some specialist or imaging flows, members are prompted to first visit with or find a PCP, for diagnosis and referral. Other enhancements include guiding those members who decline urgent care to primary care and specialists. 

We’ve improved how members manage urgent care needs

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), about 79.7% of adults visited the emergency room due to lack of access to other providers because the doctor's office was not open (48.0%), or there was no other place to go (46.3%). 

With ER visits costing up to 10X the rate of an urgent care center, your ability to divert members to urgent care from an emergency room is one of the biggest areas where you can effectively reduce wasted medical spend. New updates to how we map and audit search topics improve our ability to redirect the searches most likely to result in an ER visit to urgent care. And more than 100 condition searches guide members to in-network urgent care and retail clinics.

Not only are members redirected toward urgent care when an urgent care need arises, when a need isn't urgent, we also redirect from urgent care to a PCP or specialist provider. In this case, Amino redirects patients away from urgent care into specialist providers most relevant to the search criteria across 50 topics. 

We’ve added filter-by-distance  and search-by-name functionality

The geographic location of a given provider is consistently rated a top consideration when members are looking for care. Recent updates make better use of geographic mapping technology to help members find doctors that are local by introducing the ability to filter search results by distance.

We also know that many Amino platform users have existing relationships with specific providers, and they use Amino to evaluate the quality and cost of care they provide. Now, plan members can search by provider name and quickly validate whether that provider offers safe, appropriate, and cost-effective care available. 

We’re empowering care coordinators to better serve their patients

Plan members aren’t the only ones using the Amino platform to make care recommendations. This release supports care coordinator in ways previously unseen with expanded data coverage that improves phone-based healthcare concierges’ ability to make the best recommendations to a patient, based on that patient’s unique health plan and benefits.

This release also delivers several new capabilities to care coordinators, including easy filtering, searching for a provider by name, sharing a list of providers with a patient, as well as the ability to ‘impersonate’ a member, or see exactly what they see on their end as they search for care, including any point solutions they have available to them. Read more about how Amino streamlines workflows for care coordinators. 

All of these optimizations are a reflection of what we’ve heard our partners and their members most want to see. Those conversations contribute the insights that we need to evolve the Amino platform and further our mission to provide the most trusted and convenient way for people to choose the best care at the best cost.

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