How Health Partners Plans Scaled from 5 to 67 Counties in Just 9 Months

Economic inequality has long been linked to health inequities, with chronic conditions disproportionately affecting low-income Americans. In the 1980s, a group of Philadelphia-area hospitals formed Health Partners Plans (HPP) to close the gap. 

The not-for-profit organization removes barriers to high-quality care, offering a variety of programs and services to help members in underserved communities get and stay healthy. Its innovative approach and strong track record has attracted national attention. 

But it can’t fulfill its mission alone. To broaden access to care, HPP partners with thousands of local organizations and healthcare providers, including hospitals, clinics and community health centers.

In 2020, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania presented HPP with the opportunity to expand its award-winning Medicaid plan statewide. But with just nine months to lay the groundwork, the pressure was on. 

“We needed to more than double our provider network in a very short amount of time, and we realized we couldn’t rely on legacy processes to make it happen,” said Chris McTiernan, senior vice president of clinical and provider management. 

Using DocuSign, HPP met the tight deadline for state approval while creating a friction-free onboarding experience for new provider partners.

Accelerating provider onboarding from a month to a day

With the expansion, Health Partners Plans’ reach went from five counties in Southeastern Pennsylvania to all 67 across the Commonwealth—an amazing milestone facilitated by DocuSign-powered workflows.

In the first year, HPP grew its provider network by 60%, added 100 more network hospitals, and provided 90 thousand additional members with access to care.

“Had we kept doing things the old way, we likely wouldn’t have been successful in building the network we did in time,” said McTiernan. The old way involved a lot of human intervention and manual handoffs. “There were many opportunities for the process to fail—and it often did fail.” 

With eSignature, HPP connected multiple moving pieces and teams into one seamless, automated workflow. 

“For standard agreements, we implemented a PowerForm to capture all required information for contracting and credentialing,” said McTiernan.

By replacing paper-based forms and PDFs with a guided, user-friendly process, HPP slashed the time it takes to onboard new providers from up to 30 days to less than 24 hours. And the routing errors and missing data that caused major delays in the past are nonexistent now. 

Presenting the $432 million case for DocuSign eSignature

After creating a business case with DocuSign Value Consultants, HPP learned its expansion came with an additional annual revenue potential of $432 million.

“Looking at the expected volume and estimated time savings, DocuSign was an easy sell,” said McTiernan. HPP’s experience using eSignature internally went a long way in helping secure executive buy-in to expand usage. “When we started to add everything up, the numbers made sense pretty quickly.”

Using eSignature to streamline provider contracting and network development workflows was a big win for employee productivity. Because of the new efficiencies gained, HPP’s five-person contracts team was able to manage an increased workload without the company needing to upstaff. At over $93,000 a year for every new administrator, the cost savings were huge.

Now, stakeholders can see where contracts are in the signing process—something that was impossible to track before. Having that visibility has been a game changer when it comes to getting contracts over the finish line and preventing missed deadlines.

Scaling without sacrificing experience

Pennsylvania has one of the largest Medicaid programs in the country, accounting for a third of all state spending. Through its recent expansion, Health Partners Plans increased its Medicaid market share by nearly 3%—but the organization has only scratched the surface of what’s possible. 

Close to three million enrollees are now in reach. And using digital tools like DocuSign eSignature enables HPP to scale at any pace without compromising experience. 

“In many cases, this is the first experience our providers have with our company,” said McTiernan. “DocuSign helps make it seamless.”