Questions people actually ask us.

Dyad Health is a dementia-care program for families. We work with Medicare and Medicaid health plans to care for two people at once: the person who has dementia, and the family member taking care of them. That's what the word "dyad" means — a pair of two people who belong together.

Families where one person is living with dementia or serious memory loss, and another family member is the main caregiver. To join, the person with dementia usually needs to have both Medicare and Medicaid, and be enrolled in a health plan that partners with us. If you aren't sure what insurance they have, join our waitlist anyway — we can help figure it out.

No cost to families. The health plan pays us. We are not paid by, and never will be paid by, the families we care for.

"Dual eligible" means a person qualifies for both Medicare (federal health insurance for older adults and people with certain disabilities) and Medicaid (state health insurance for people with lower incomes). About 12 million Americans are dual eligible, and they often have the most complex health needs.

"D-SNP" stands for "Dual Eligible Special Needs Plan." It is a special kind of Medicare Advantage plan designed for people who have both Medicare and Medicaid. These plans usually cover more benefits than regular Medicare. Dyad Health works with D-SNPs to care for their members with dementia. Read our full plain-English D-SNP explainer →

A care team you can call any time, made up of:

• A care navigator who speaks your language and works with your family directly.
• A dementia specialist on our team — a clinician focused on the dementia-specific questions (medications, behavior changes, caregiver support) — who works with the doctors you already see.
• A plan for the caregiver — check-ins, help with benefits, and breaks from caregiving when they're needed.
• Help making the home safer (things like preventing falls).
• Regular medication reviews so nothing harmful is being prescribed.

Respite care means giving the family caregiver a break from caregiving — a few hours, a day, or sometimes longer. Someone else stays with the person who has dementia while the caregiver rests, runs errands, or sees a doctor themselves. Caregivers who get regular respite are much less likely to burn out and end up needing medical care of their own. At Dyad, we schedule respite before the caregiver is at her breaking point, based on how she's doing on our weekly check-ins.

Yes. We only use information you give us through this site to help your family, and only the people on your care team see it. We never sell your information, and we never use it for marketing. You can read the details in our Privacy Policy.

We plan to launch in select California counties in the summer of 2026, with one health plan partner. We plan to expand to more plans and more states in 2027. Join our waitlist and we will reach out when we can help in your area.

When the caregiver is struggling, the person with dementia usually ends up in the emergency room or admitted to the hospital within a few weeks. Those visits are expensive. By supporting the caregiver before she breaks down, we prevent many of those visits. Savings come from fewer hospital admissions, fewer emergency room trips, and less time in skilled nursing facilities after discharge. Plan-specific modeling happens with each partner plan during engagement.

Regular care management works with one person — the patient. The family caregiver is treated as a phone number on a form. Dyad works with two people — the patient and their main caregiver — as one care plan. We also have smaller caseloads per navigator (community-based, not a call-center model), and we specialize in dementia rather than trying to cover every condition.

The Long-term Enhanced ACO Design (LEAD) Model is the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' successor to ACO REACH. It launches January 1, 2027 and runs for ten years through 2036 — the longest performance period CMS has ever tested in an ACO model. Key changes include embedding high-needs and dual-eligible beneficiaries across all participating ACO panels, a prospective payment track for ACOs whose attributed population is 40%+ high-needs, and a two-state Medicare-Medicaid alignment pilot that will formally test ACO-Medicaid partnerships.

We provide the segment-specific operating model for the highest-cost, highest-impact population in the LEAD panel: dual-eligible beneficiaries with dementia. Specifically, we supply:

• High-needs attribution infrastructure — systematic prospective identification of dementia-affected dyads, which compounds toward the 40% threshold that unlocks prospective payment.
• GUIDE-compliant clinical delivery — care navigation, 24/7 line, structured caregiver education, and respite; layered under LEAD accountability.
• CARA-ready specialist relationships — geriatric neurology, geriatric psychiatry, and palliative care partners with episode definitions aligned to community stabilization.
• HCC / RAF / Star-measure capture — household-level visibility surfaces documentation your clinicians never saw, without adding workflow.

They're designed to complement each other. The GUIDE Model (Guiding an Improved Dementia Experience) is an eight-year CMS payment model that reimburses comprehensive dementia care — navigation, 24/7 access, caregiver training, up to $2,500/year in respite. Our care delivery is GUIDE-compliant; health systems can participate in GUIDE and use Dyad as their delivery partner. Under LEAD, GUIDE's per-beneficiary payments layer underneath the ACO's shared-savings upside, giving you both fee-for-service stability on the dementia-care infrastructure and LEAD's longer-horizon performance incentives on total cost of care.

FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is the modern standard for exchanging structured clinical data between health systems, plans, and care providers. Under the CMS Interoperability and Prior Authorization Final Rule (effective April 2026), FHIR is the required substrate for prior authorization, Patient Access, Provider Access, and Payer-to-Payer APIs — with 24- and 72-hour decision clocks by 2027.

Dyad Health is FHIR-native from day one, conformant with HL7 FHIR R4, US Core, and the Da Vinci PAS and CRD implementation guides CMS named in the rule. Every clinical submission is assembled from canonical resources and reviewed by a former managed-care clinical reviewer before it leaves our system, so plans receive complete, first-pass-ready packets. Read the full FHIR explainer →

Most prior-auth submissions fail on first pass because documentation is incomplete — a missing cognitive assessment, an unspecified functional status, a medication reconciliation that never made it to the referring provider. Dyad Health's home-based, dyadic care model generates that documentation as a byproduct of care, and our FHIR-native platform keeps it in canonical form. Before any submission leaves our system, a former managed-care utilization-management reviewer — a nurse or clinical pharmacist who previously adjudicated these requests inside a health plan — pre-flights the packet against the exact payer criteria. They know what complete looks like because they spent years returning the incomplete ones. The result: submissions cleared on first pass, inside the 24/72-hour windows the CMS ePA rule will require.

Yes. Our clinical coordination is HL7 FHIR R4 native, bidirectional. Updates from the dyad — home risk signals, caregiver burden scores, completed respite, behavioral changes, medication adherence — flow back into Epic, Cerner, Athena, or any FHIR-capable EHR alongside your own notes. Your clinicians see our activity without logging into a separate portal. No new workflow, no parallel documentation.

Yes — and that's a direct consequence of how we work, not an add-on. Because our care navigators see the dyad in their home and community, they surface conditions (especially cognitive impairment, mood, frailty, polypharmacy, and caregiver-driven medication non-adherence) that clinic and hospital encounters miss. That visibility flows back to your care team through our FHIR exchange, so your clinicians can document conditions they're already treating but may not be capturing. Quality measures — especially Part C medication adherence and Part D measures on dual-eligible populations — move on the same visibility loop.

Email hello@dyad-health.com. Families, health plans, partners, press, and anyone else — all at the same address.