Healthcare services · Medicaid complex care

Pair Team

A California medical group delivering Medicaid Enhanced Care Management to people living in shelters, cars and encampments. Four peer-reviewed papers behind it, contracts in nine counties, and a new Medicare contract that pays only when patients get better.

A caseload of sixty two

Tameika Harris worked from a home office in Riverside County, calling about a dozen of the 62 Medi-Cal patients on her list each day. They lived in unstable housing, so she kept close contact. “You never know what’s going on,” she told a reporter in 2023.

When a patient felt sick, Harris did not send them anywhere. She put them on the phone with a registered nurse who could triage it. “If they were to go to an emergency room, they’d have to wait for one to three hours,” she said.

The benefit that created the market

In January 2022 California launched CalAIM, a restructuring of Medi-Cal, which covers roughly one in three Californians. Its centerpiece is Enhanced Care Management, which pays for intensive case management for defined populations of focus: people experiencing homelessness, people with serious mental illness or substance use disorder, people leaving youth correctional facilities, and people racking up avoidable hospital visits. Community Supports pays separately for housing navigation and similar services.

The money arrived before the capacity did. Health plans must contract with providers, and most safety net clinics had neither the staff nor the data plumbing. Ella Schwartz of the California Health Care Foundation put it plainly in 2023. “Doing Enhanced Care Management isn’t easy; if it were, everyone would be doing it,” she said.

Pair Team sells into that gap. It contracts with Medi-Cal managed care plans as an Enhanced Care Management provider, then recruits clinics and community organizations into a shared network and pays them for services. Named plan partners include Health Net, Molina Healthcare and Central California Alliance for Health.

An engineer and a nurse

Neil Batlivala was born in Florida and grew up mostly in Singapore and India, where his elementary school sat across from a slum. Children from it came over daily for snacks; he spent that time at a nearby nursing station handing out bandages. He studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon.

Cassie Choi is a registered nurse who worked in emergency medicine in Boston and cardiac critical care at NewYork Presbyterian Columbia, then at Kaiser Permanente and UCSF. She was the first nurse at the primary care startup Forward.

They met at Forward, a membership practice charging $149 a month, and founded Pair Team in 2019 to point that kind of care at people who have no money at all. The first version was software and remote staff for community health centers. “The critical problem they have is not a technology problem; it’s a staffing problem,” Batlivala said in 2021.

He read the policy weather early. “if the 2010s was the decade of Medicare innovation, with Medicare Advantage and accountable care organizations, the 2020s is the decade of Medicaid innovation, and actually promoting health equity and moving our community health centers and rural health care into value-based arrangements,” he said that December, a month before CalAIM went live.

From vendor to medical group

The company kept changing shape. It began as clinic infrastructure, added its own clinicians, and became an Enhanced Care Management provider in its own right. In December 2023 it announced seven new counties, bringing it to nine: San Bernardino, Riverside, Fresno, Merced, Monterey, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, San Joaquin and Stanislaus. In January 2025 it converted to a public benefit corporation.

Then it turned toward Medicare. Around mid 2025 it put a voice AI agent called Flora in front of patients as first contact, handling intake, referrals and check in calls. On April 30, 2026 it announced acceptance into the CMS ACCESS Model, a ten year Medicare experiment that began July 5, 2026 and pays for outcomes rather than logged activities. “The government is creating swim lanes for AI innovation in traditionally regulated industries,” Batlivala told TechCrunch. On the low per patient rates that worry other participants he was unsentimental: “If you want to build a model that truly incentivizes the use of AI, the reimbursement rates have to be low.”

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: the care model has more published evidence than almost any startup in this corner of Medicaid, and the studies are candid about what they cannot prove. The marketing numbers are another matter. They move between releases, outrun the published effect sizes, and attribute a per patient savings figure to a paper that contains none. The gap is not between the company and reality. It is between the company’s own research and its own press.

What to watch

• A controlled study. Both papers promise one, and the Camden precedent is why it matters.
• ACCESS results. The model runs ten years and pays only when blood pressure, HbA1c or depression scores actually move.
• Whether Flora holds up. A voice agent as first contact for people in crisis is a real bet, and no outcome data on it has been published.
• Medicaid policy risk. The business rests on a state benefit and on continuous enrollment.
• Any Form D after June 2024. There has not been one, despite a reported total the filings do not reach.

In their words

Related companies

• HealthSherpa: Shared investor: Kapor Capital. A Sacramento company that rebuilt the front end of HealthCare.gov for agents and carriers
• CareRev: Shared investor: Gaingels. A per diem shift marketplace that let hospitals book local nurses by the day
• Vitable Health: Also in Healthcare Services. A Philadelphia company that began by sending nurse practitioners into the homes of hourly workers, and now sells small employers a federal health reimbursement
• Modern Health: Also in Healthcare Services. An employer-bought mental health benefit that sorts staff into coaching, therapy or self-guided content

Sources

1. Public recordA Novel Intervention for Medicaid Beneficiaries with Complex NeedsJ Gen Intern Med · Sep 25, 2025
2. Public recordEnhanced Care Management for High-Need Pediatric Medicaid MembersJMIR Pediatr Parent · Apr 22, 2026
3. Public recordACCESS Model Participants rosterCMS · Sep 15, 2026
4. Public recordForm D, Pair Team, Inc., CIK 0001995663SEC · Oct 19, 2023
5. Public recordForm D, Pair Team, Inc., CIK 0001995663SEC · Jun 10, 2024
6. IndependentMedicare’s new payment model is built for AITechCrunch, Connie Loizos · May 12, 2026
7. IndependentStartup Pair Team Bolsters Work of Community Health CentersHealthcare Innovation, David Raths · Dec 21, 2021
8. InterviewHealthTech: Neil Batlivala of Pair TeamAuthority Magazine · May 31, 2022
9. InvestorTech Start-up Dives Into Medi-Cal Enhanced Care ManagementCalifornia Health Care Foundation, an investor · Mar 2023
10. InvestorA Business Model That Closes Care Gaps for People Experiencing HomelessnessCalifornia Health Care Foundation, an investor · Jan 29, 2025
11. CompanyPair Team Raises $9 Million Series APR Newswire · Oct 19, 2023
12. CompanyPair Team Expands Into New California MarketsPR Newswire · Dec 14, 2023
13. CompanyPair Team Transitions to Public Benefit CorporationPR Newswire · Jan 16, 2025
14. CompanyPair Team Accepted into CMS ACCESS ModelPR Newswire · Apr 30, 2026
15. CompanyPair Team website, home and press pagesAccessed Sep 22, 2026