Today we're announcing that Baba has been accepted into the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services ACCESS Model across all four clinical tracks. ACCESS is a first-of-its-kind payment model in Original Medicare designed to help people prevent and manage chronic disease through technology-enabled care. 

Baba serves Medicare, Medicare Advantage, and Medicaid populations, connecting beneficiaries with trained advocates (RNs, LCSWs, and CHWs) who coordinate care across their medical, behavioral health, and social needs. Our advocates find and secure the right benefits at the right time, before small problems turn into health crises or hardship. By supercharging our human clinical team with AI workflows, Baba is helping everyone have an effective medical and financial advocate in their pocket.

What is ACCESS trying to solve

ACCESS launches with four clinical tracks:

• Early Cardio-Kidney-Metabolic (eCKM) — hypertension, high cholesterol, obesity, and prediabetes.

• Cardio-Kidney-Metabolic (CKM) — diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.

• Musculoskeletal (MSK) — chronic musculoskeletal pain.

• Behavioral Health (BH) — depression and anxiety.

These conditions affect more than two-thirds of Medicare beneficiaries. But the hardest part of managing a chronic condition often has nothing to do with the diagnosis. In 2024, half of people on Medicare lived on less than $43,200 a year, and one in four on less than $24,600. When a patient is rationing groceries to afford rent, no amount of remote monitoring will lower their blood pressure. ACCESS recognizes that those upstream drivers disproportionately unlock better population-wide health.

How this looks in practice

Meet a client we'll call Daphne: on Original Medicare, in a physically abusive household, and living with depression and anxiety that no medication regimen was improving. You can't medicate your way out of a house on fire. Years earlier a provider had turned her away, so she'd stopped asking for help at all.

Her Baba advocate didn't hand her a list of hotlines and wish her luck. They connected her with a therapist, coordinated with Adult Protective Services on her open case, and moved her into housing she already qualified for. Housed and finally in steady treatment, Daphne could shift from a constant state of survival toward one of recovery.

This is the model of care ACCESS is built to reward.

Baba's in-house platform powers this whole-person case management. Our AI tools let a single advocate understand a patient's medical history and coverage, triage what's urgent, fill out forms in a fraction of the time, handle prior authorizations, skip the long phone holds, and route people to the right community or faith-based resources. When advocates work this way, we keep seeing the same early signal: lower cost of care and faster outcomes.

But case management is inherently episodic, with acuity spiking after diagnoses, discharges, and accidents. This explains why the market for "caregiving apps" has historically been a graveyard: constant manual logging is tedious, so it gets neglected, which means the data is outdated in exactly the moments of crisis when you most need current medical records, insurance information, and an accurate snapshot of the patient's health.

So we built a model in which human support is deployed when needed, with more autonomous solutions acting as a safety net the rest of the time. ACCESS introduces the first reimbursement paradigm built for precision benefits like these.

"My family became totally overwhelmed by the needs of navigating my grandmother's stroke recovery. Our healthcare system is extraordinarily capable but equally complex. ACCESS is a bet that ubiquitous, hyper-personalized case management will let more families focus on living their lives instead of becoming a full-time medical advocate for themselves."

Connor Sweeney, founder, Baba

We're just getting started

The work ahead is to bring Baba’s level of precision to every Medicare beneficiary and every organization that supports them.

Virtual care delivery is hard to innovate in. Traditional care-delivery companies often lack the technical capacity to build transformative AI infrastructure, so they show up with good intentions and brittle solutions. Many technology companies make the opposite mistake, underestimating the edge cases and the human trust healthcare runs on, and quietly compromising on clinical rigor. Baba is the exception: clinical rigor led by veterans of the nation's top health systems and an engineering team drawn from frontier AI labs and top tech companies.

Our advocates are already doing this work with families across the country. ACCESS gives us a way to reach the Medicare beneficiaries who need it most, and it's a major step on Baba's roadmap to becoming the best place to navigate life's healthcare decisions.

If your organization serves Medicare beneficiaries, reach out. We'd like to talk about how Baba can reduce network leakage, improve your patients' outcomes, and add effective bandwidth to your staff.