by Tony Chen

I recently picked up Inc's list of the 500 fastest growing private companies in America. #1 must be some technology company, or maybe a new company in energy, right? Much to my surprise, it is Senior Whole Health, a company that specializes in healthcare and other services for (wait for it...) the elderly poor.

Huh? How does a company grow 31,000%+ over 3 years focused on the infamously dubbed "dual-eligibles" (Medicare and Medicaid). As with any company with such success, they offer a compelling value proposition.

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Through working with their state government, they created a new type of entity, called Senior Care Organizations (SCOs) that keeps folks out of nursing homes or in the least restrictive setting possible. SCOs are essentially the conglomeration of all the services required to meet that objective - nurses on phone call, physician tracking, and EMR systems. The key resource, though, is the community resource coordinator (think of a patient advocate/home nurse/social worker hybrid), that visits every new enrollee and arranges for whatever is necessary - housing, electric scooters, Meals on Wheels, adult day care, etc.

The money quote from their chairman Outland:

"We don't have a cost avoidance strategy. It's about care management improvement, which translates into quality-of-life improvement, which trickles down into cost savings."

They now have almost 6,000 members and have a revenue of $147MM in 2007. But don't get any ideas just yet to start something like this in your neck of the woods. Remember that this start-up actually "started" in the state legislature first.

Nonetheless, this is social innovation at its best. Adding tremendous value to particular niche of society (they originally wanted to do this non-profit) while landing on a sustainable and scalable business model.