Humana is teaming up with the Xavier Ochsner College of Medicine to fund scholarships that aim to address the shortage of healthcare workers in the region.
The insurer is investing $3 million in the Humana Health Workforce Scholarship Fund, which will cover the full tuition for incoming medical students at XOCOM. The goal, the partners said, is to attract top talent from Louisiana and keep them working in healthcare in the Pelican State.
XOCOM was established in 2024 as a partnership between Xavier University of Louisiana, a historically Black college, and Ochsner Health, a provider based in the Gulf region. Leonardo Seoane, M.D., the founding dean of XOCOM, told Fierce Healthcare that Louisiana and other states around the Gulf often place among the worst nationally in terms of patient outcomes.
So addressing that challenge brought Xavier and Ochsner together, and Humana has local roots that brought it into the fold as well. The company also supports scholarships at Xavier for physician assistants, and often hires its pharmacists, said George Renaudin, president of insurance at Humana, in an interview.
Renaudin said his personal roots in Louisiana stretch back to a time leading the Medicare program for Ochsner Health Plan, which Humana acquired in 2004. So when the launch of XOCOM was announced, that prompted him to reach out about the potential to partner.
"This is not a partnership for communications and conversations and relationships," Seoane said. "These are really relationships that are pretty deep between Xavier University and Humana and the health system, Ochsner Health."
Humana similarly partnered with the University of Houston in 2018 to launch the Humana Integrated Health Systems Science Institute, with a focus on ways to integrate population health programs into medical education. The insurers' focus on value-based care will also play a role in its relationship with XOCOM.
Students will be eligible for the scholarship by demonstrating financial need and making the commitment to practice primary care, internal medicine or maternal care in Louisiana once they graduate. Seoane said, for example, that this gives the opportunity for medical students from the rural parts of the state to practice medicine back in those areas, which are often underserved and where patients face the starkest access challenges.
Renaudin said there's ROI in initiatives like this for a health plan as the payers themselves are largely not responsible for providing care, and they're reliant on quality providers in the regions where they serve. Ensuring that patients in those markets have robust, high-quality networks through which to seek care is a key investment in the health of their members.
"It's really a long-term investment in the health of the state in this instance, and not really any response to any specific business need," he said, "other than the fact that we just know through a value-oriented lens that access to care delivers better outcomes and lower costs in the future."
Seoane said that the value-based focus at both Humana and Ochsner sets the stage to build on the future, as the partners are discussing ways to incorporate that into curriculum or into graduate education experience to engage medical students earlier.
The scholarship itself addresses a critical need, as medical students often incur significant debt completing their schooling, but that funding can be further expanded in the future, too, he said.
"We know we need more primary care, but we also need to train a physician that understands value-based care, and we're uniquely positioned to do that," he said.
Renaudin added that both Humana and XOCOM hope that the partnership could serve as a model to bring together payers and providers on similar initiatives.
"This is one initiative, I think, that's a major step forward, but of many parts, to try to make a change in the healthcare system for the better and deliver better health outcomes to the people of Louisiana and by extension, Mississippi," he said.