Converge Cast | Scaling Innovation from Within the Healthcare Ecosystem: Amir Dan Rubin
In this episode of WittKieffer’s Converge Cast podcast series, Amir Dan Rubin talks with WittKieffer’s Michael Castleman and Shelly Carolan about the evolving and increasingly...
In this episode of WittKieffer’s Converge Cast podcast series, Amir Dan Rubin talks with WittKieffer’s Michael Castleman and Shelly Carolan about the evolving and increasingly convergent forces of value-based care, new healthcare entrants, and digital health, as well as opportunities and challenges of start-ups in today’s market.
Amir has spent his storied career seeking novel ways to increase access to care, improve care efficiency, and promote population health, including through top leadership roles with One Medical, Stanford Health, and Optum/United Health, among others. Currently the CEO and Founding Managing Partner of Healthier Capital, he partners with technology-powered healthcare innovators to advance healthier outcomes.
“The best innovation happens when you can innovate or disrupt from within the ecosystem,” Rubin says. Notably, he observes transformations fueled by creative partnerships and inspired by the change taking place around them.
Rubin considers himself a “techno-optimist” – and it’s clear he sees a brighter future for healthcare access, quality, and cost.
(Full transcript available below)
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Full Transcript
Chapter 1: Introduction
WittKieffer is the premier executive search and leadership advisory firm developing impactful leadership teams for organizations that improve quality of life.
We welcome you to the WittKieffer Converge cast where we bring together the brightest minds in healthcare, life sciences, and education.
Each episode. We invite experts, innovators and voices from diverse backgrounds to share their insights and discuss the challenges that affect the health and well-being of our communities.
Together, we’ll navigate the complexities and discuss the tangible benefits and hurdles associated with the shift towards improved consumer experiences and better patient outcomes.
Michael:
Well, welcome to our next Converge podcast where we bring leaders from across the quality of life ecosystem, healthcare, life sciences and education together to explore the increasingly convergent trends impacting the well-being of people in our communities.
We have two cohosts today.
I think something needed to keep pace with today’s guest. I’m Michael Castleman, Chief Business Officer, WittKieffer. I also have the privilege of leading our global life sciences, investor-backed healthcare and interim leadership solutions teams. I’m joined by Shelley Carolyn, Managing Partner of the investor-backed healthcare team that serves companies backed by private, institutional, public, and corporate capital.
But most important, I’d like to introduce today’s guest privileged, honored, and pleased to welcome Amir, Dan Rubin to our discussion. Amir began his career as a consultant before moving into hospital operations at Memorial. He then moved to UCLA, where he rose to become COO.
Think reflective of what I now see as a passion to always be moving forward. He joined Stanford Healthcare as President and CEO, focusing on culture, quality, and clinical innovation, expanded community reach, new technologies, and ways of engaging patients.
New benefit programs, so many other things to improve outcomes and lives of the Northern California community continued his focus on transforming the healthcare system, joining United Healthcare’s Optum division, where he led several business lines.
Most recently and perhaps more widely recognized now, Amir joined One Medical as CEO, led the growth of One Medical and membership based national primary care group from a venture backed company to a public company and ultimately to a nearly $4 billion sale to Amazon.
I think as important as the dollars is the impact you have on the people and communities those groups serve.
Post One Medical, Amir’s founded Healthier Capital again, a name I just love for its multi-dimensional aspect.
As it relates to the mission as well as the nature of investing.
Healthier Capital is formed to work with technology powered healthcare innovators to advance healthier outcomes for all. You’ve been twice winner of the EY entrepreneur, excuse me Entrepreneur of the Year award, served on the boards, multiple companies, and foundations.
So many accolades there.
It’s probably, I’d need another 30 minutes to really go through your background, Amir. But I think one of the things I’ve found in getting to know you is just what a wonderful person you are beyond the professional accomplishments.
So again, want to thank you for joining us and I’m going to let Shelly kick it off.
Shelly:
Well, Amir, after that introduction, I think a good place to start is you had such an incredible career trajectory and so many facets within healthcare.
What do you consider the highlights of that journey?
Amir:
Well, thank you, Michael, and Shelly, what a delight it is to be with you both.
I don’t know. I think we just called the podcast after that nice intro. I think I can only go down from here. Thank you for those kind and generous words, I think.
Shelly, to your question, I’ve wanted to make a significant impact, positive impact in healthcare throughout my career and never really thought I it would be in one area or another or maybe didn’t know where I would be doing it.
So for me, a little bit like innovation, innovation builds upon itself. I think in my career, I think each of my experiences have been wonderful and enjoyed so much and also over time they kind of build upon themselves. I found I learned things along the way.
So it’s hard to say any particular thing. I think when I look at my good fortune that I’ve had and the good opportunities that I’ve had, I think I’ve been fortunate to get exposure to multiple parts of the ecosystem, health systems, hospitals, medical groups, health plans, tech companies, private companies, public companies.
And I think that’s informed how I think about things and try to see healthcare from the eyes of multiple different stakeholders and participants.
Chapter 2: Executing at Scale and One Medical
Shelley:
Is there one experience that you’ve had Amir, or you know that really helped guide your strategy at One Medical when you came in, it was I think you know a dozen or so clinics or and the growth was tremendous.
What was sort of your when you went in, what experiences were you taking with you that guided the strategy when you arrived?
Amir:
Well, I think a few common themes maybe through some of my career experiences, I’ve always wanted to have a great impact on patients, members, consumers, customers, whatever the right word is in the in the context.
And so that’s always been a common focus. I’ve always had a desire to help heal and restore in in in healthcare and in the world. So those were some things, some common themes and I’ve throughout my career been focused on how can we execute at scale.
So I think those themes were present throughout the last several roles I had at UCLA as COO.
We had actually a book written on us by an author, Joseph Michelli, who’s written books on Starbucks and Ritz Carlton and Zappos, he wrote a book, Prescription for Excellence.
He’s now writing a book on US and One Medical by the way, because we were able to have an organization that went from the lower rankings in customer service to the highest at UCLA.
We did the same at Stanford. We brought those techniques also to Optum and we’ve leveraged him at One Medical. So I think an amazing experience has been something that I’ve always focused on and that I certainly found it was a core tenant of One Medical when I got there and why it resonated.
I think another thing that I’ve focused on throughout my career is execution.
And so leveraging techniques from lean and design thinking, Toyota Production System, at UCLA, we had the UCLA operating system and at Stanford we had the Stanford Operating system. At Optum, we had the Optum Performance System.
At One Medical, we had the One Medical performance system or “TOPS” and so I think having thoughtful ways that we could sustain and scale performance and marrying that in the customer experience.
The nice thing is our customer service scores improved as we grew. Why? Well, because we had more systematic approaches.
I’d say another thing that is probably common throughout my career, certainly last few roles is how do we think about innovation, whether it was at Stanford, the I think we were the first to do virtual care in Epic, the first to build an app, one of the very first to have a little venture arm.
We had a Medicare Advantage plan early on. We, we thought about innovation certainly at One Medical built a whole tech stack and an innovative business model.
So those are some of the themes throughout my career that I think have been continued, extended, and expanded upon at One Medical.
Chapter 3: Evolving Strategy based on Mission & Culture
Michael:
When you think about strategy, Amir, and especially a company that’s growing from you know 12 offices to 60 and beyond and national strategy and execution are never linear in part because the environment doesn’t allow us to be linear and our patients and our customers don’t allow us to sit still.
Was there a significant pivot you can point to at One Medical and then as a leader how do you get and engage the leadership team in seeing and making that pivot?
Amir:
Well, I think a few things.
I think one, we had a great foundation at One Medical with an amazing mission and culture and so a belief in making healthcare work better for kind of all the key stakeholders and a belief in kind of a great culture and core strategic insight.
One, this concept of the member, this is kind of different in healthcare and we had consumers who would sign up as members, but we really built upon that and then said hey, how about signing employers?
And so not just B to C, but B to B and business to consumer, but also business to business.
So that allowed us, we now have 9,400 plus employers at One Medical that allowed us to grow. Also,
We took the concept of the member and said well besides that being some incremental revenue and allows us to kind of acquire customers in an interesting way.
It allows us actually to do what’s called population health and the traditional kind of fee for service world.
As a care delivery organization, you don’t know who the patient is until they come and see you.
But now since they’ve signed up, we actually know who the patient is, who the member is, and we could reach out to them. So that allows us to do outbound population health.
Hey, it’s time for a mammogram or a pap smear or how are you doing on your blood sugar or your stress or your anxiety and actually allowed us to move health outcomes and not just care interventions.
So it expanded our thinking there as we got into the B2B world that also we started demonstrating, you know, if we can do proactive population health and we have this wonderful accessible model of care, we could probably demonstrate we could reduce your cost.
And we had a paper published in JAMA Network Open a couple years back that showed for one employer we took their cost down 45%.
Not bent the cost curve, but took it down almost in half. So really started demonstrating not just great experience and access and service but also kind of reducing the cost of care. So innovations in kind of in expansions on the membership model moving into kind of population health and value-based care.
We also significantly built upon technology and really expanded both synchronous virtual care and that’s become more ubiquitous but also asynchronous.
And again at the margin there is there is no charge at the margin for this on demand care which further helps reduce access and friction to access and care and we built a lot of automation.
For example, if you message your provider we have a natural language processing NLP layer, can read that message, can route it off of the in-office provider to one of our virtual team members.
We now have generative AI in the loop with human in the loop that can help draft responses.
So you know built upon a membership model, adapted that to employers for population health value-based care, built out a sophisticated technology model that also then further integrated into the existing ecosystems, laboratories, pharmacies, health systems, other EHRs.
Michael:
You mentioned the concept of population health which really is fundamental to the concept of value based care, which in turn requires some amount of continuity in the relationship between the provider and the consumer.
Did you see data evolve and change in that the length of continuity, the length of membership that showed both the approach to care was creating more longevity and continuity and that that longevity and continuity was in turn contributing to better outcomes.
Amir:
We did indeed see that. And this is why as we’re talking about a great experience and execution matter. But as one has that, absolutely.
Then you can start moving and we showed we had top decile performance on various metrics, HEDIS metrics we published on diabetes over two points of hemoglobin A1C reduction, which is kind of twice the published results for other diabetes intervention solutions for patients with uncontrolled diabetes and did amazing work and other chronic conditions.
So yes, that that requires longitudinal relationships, that requires trusting relationships. That’s why an omni-channel approach we thought was also powerful. Sometimes it’s virtual, sometimes it’s on demand, sometimes it’s scheduled, sometimes you need lab work, blood work, a pap smear, you know suturing. But we can coordinate that.
And so we absolutely saw that and then we were able to demonstrate that both direct to consumer, to our direct to consumer members, but also to employers.
Chapter 4: New Entrants & Innovation in Healthcare
Shelly:
Ultimately, as mentioned earlier, Amazon acquired One Medical and it’s the pillar of its healthcare strategy.
And there’s a lot of debate about the impact of U.S. healthcare from new entrants both in retail and other markets.
So would you give us your thoughts on, you know, what do you think are the positive and negative impacts of new entrants into healthcare today from where your experiences have led your thought process?
Amir:
Yeah, well, in, in general, I’m really positive on anybody trying to help innovate in healthcare.
I think in general it’s great. We could all benefit from longer health spans, longer lifespan with higher levels of health and innovation in healthcare is I think amazing and needed.
And so in general I’m, I’m excited about new entrants whether it’s in the startup world or whether it’s innovative companies from technology or retail or other spaces.
I think in general it’s really great for healthcare and ultimately great for the consumer and patient and the participants in the ecosystem.
So I think that’s super positive for the consumer, for healthcare. But, you know Healthcare is big and complicated and these are, they get a lot of attention, but these are in the scheme of things, you know still small incremental moves in in healthcare, but I think really positive probably because they also generate secondary effects.
Will other organizations start looking at things and doing things and that’s kind of I think good for the for the general marketplace.
Shelly:
Yeah, I was just going to say, I mean all of these new aspects you had mentioned omni-channel and you know asynchronous care and all of these things.
How do you think these innovative, you know, players are pushing the more traditional health systems to think about how they’re interacting with their communities and how they sort of be able to continue to be innovative and be part of that that new transformative ecosystem that’s, you know, evolving really quickly.
Amir:
There are multiple ways that incumbents, if you will, are engaging in innovation.
I mean first of all, we need health plans, hospitals, medical groups, insurance laboratories, pharmacies.
They’re not going away and when we need them and they are innovating and we have amazing doctors and nurses and clinicians and insurance experts and actuaries at these organizations and they make up the kind of building blocks of healthcare and you have people innovating in cancer, cardiac, neuro, ortho and so these organizations are instrumental to healthcare.
It’s often hard having been at some of these big organizations to take a lot of risk and do completely new and different things from within one’s organizational model, economic model business model and that’s probably not unique to healthcare and that’s why you have startups and venture and investors and sometimes entrance from outside the industry.
And again, I think in general, that’s, that’s great. I think in healthcare, often I’ve seen that the best innovation happens when you can innovate or disrupt from within the ecosystem.
You know, Medicare is probably not going away, hopefully to treat or Medicaid or insurance, right?
And so one can be naive to these things. Or hospital doctors like, we’ll add tech, we’ll add new models. But often, it’s how do we innovate from within the ecosystem? How do things fit in to the ecosystem?
Innovative health systems and health plans are often working with start-ups. Sometimes companies get spawned out of them.
They’re doing a lot of innovative things in the way they run their organization.
Sometimes they buy start-ups, but often there’s a lot of partnerships there because ultimately the care needs to be stitched together.
You know, the administrative parts need to be stitched together, the clinical parts.
So I I’m pretty excited because I think we have, we’ve always had kind of biomedical innovation incurring in healthcare, but we haven’t necessarily had the same kind of services or care delivery model innovations or at least not from new entrance.
It’s kind of been continuous improvement from within the organizations and so I think now we’re seeing that as well which I think creates new ideas and vice versa we see a lot of spin out of great ideas from health systems, health plans as well.
So I think that innovation ecosystem is expanded in healthcare services, software solutions in new ways.
You know partly too if you go back 10-15 years, we didn’t have electronic health records.
Our information wasn’t digitized, right?
So we’re kind of just at a computer on everyone’s desk right or now a mobile phone.
I mean that’s we’ve just gotten to that point at some level in healthcare.
So being able to build kind of modernized technology powered innovations in the way we deliver care and manage care and ensure for care is really an exciting new horizon.
Chapter 5: Investing in Technology-Enabled Healthcare
Michael:
Your point about disrupting from within is in some ways antithetical to the ethos of technology in the startup environment, right? Which has for many years wanted to just purely disrupt. And this move from a disruptive to enabling model is an important one.
Yet the health system is still fragmented.
So as an investor now through healthier capital and as a startup CEO, there are so many of these digital healthcare companies that have to make that shift.
What advice would you give them to do that and how can they scale in what essentially is an incredibly fragmented market?
Amir:
I think about a few things as I talked to great entrepreneurs and startups and as I as I look to what makes an attractive investment.
First of all, I often, I often go back to how does this organization address the needs of multiple stakeholders. If you delight the consumer but the employer or payer doesn’t like it, that can be tough. So I think about who are the various parties on the demand side?
All right. But then you got to look at the supply side.
The employer likes it, but then the doctor hates it, or the nurse doesn’t like it, or it doesn’t fit into it doesn’t take insurance, which is fine.
Things can be cash paid, but that creates its own challenge, or it doesn’t integrate with information, or it doesn’t take into account workflow of people.
So the first thing that I have to look at is does the service solution offering company think about the needs of multiple stakeholders? because often you need to do that.
Just a simple example for those of us in healthcare, we have the consumer, we have an employer, and we have an insurance company, right?
So if you’re doing anything in commercial insurance or Medicare or Medicaid, you need to think about all those things.
And there are clinicians and there is multiple parties between the consumer and the offering.
And so if one is naive to that, that could be a challenge.
So more so I like things that often address multiple needs simultaneously.
I think a second related point is thinking about distribution in healthcare, how do I sell my solution or offering? Let me use One Medical as an example and I’ll just tie on to the example here.
So we had a membership model. We sold B to C, but also B to B. So we had to go sell employers, but the employers kind of would buy us because we would be in network. So we needed insurance contracts and then we said, gosh, maybe we can partner with health systems and get contracts through them so that we needed health system partners.
Well, then after that, the employer is not going to sign up again next year if nobody uses us.
So then we needed to activate the consumer, the employee to download the app, All right. But then we needed them to actually use it to show the employer that there was activity.
And then we could improve health outcomes and cost of care. So we needed the consumer, the employer, the insurance company, the health system partner. So not a simple distribution process, B to B; B to C; partners.
The second key point is thinking about distribution.
And not all models have to be that complicated, but I think one needs to think about it.
Am I selling into health systems? Who’s the purchaser? What would the process be? Does it need to link into their electronic health record? Would I require somebody to have multiple workflows?
I like to joke, you know, we want the doctors to do all this, but who of us goes to page two of a Google search?
Like, “I click on page two.” That’s too much clicking. But we expect like, busy nurses and clinicians.
So what is that workflow like? What’s that decision-making like third economic model? Is there a viable economic model?
And I’ll say today, there’s a lot of really great solutions that say when everything gets reimbursed this way in the future, then this will work. Well, that that may be OK, but what if it doesn’t?
How would you work today? This is a little bit of the disruption from within the ecosystem. How does it fit in today?
What is the economic model and is there enough of a market size there, you know, the total addressable market, is it big enough and the serviceable addressable market, Tam and Sam, these acronyms, is there enough margin here? Is there enough growth potential? What’s the economic model there?
I’d say that’s a third key area.
I’d say a fourth key area. It comes back to what we were talking before. Can you execute on it?
So, what is the ability of the team to execute? So some of that’s team and entrepreneurs and leadership and the staff, but why will this thing sustain and scale? What is it about it?
And then I think a final you know key criteria that certainly that I look at is what’s the cash needs here and the financing needs and what’s the ability to raise that financing, what’s the cash burn.
And then you have to deal with the realities of the external financing markets which has changed over the last few years and may change again. So those are some of the criteria that I generally look at that I think are important for companies.
Chapter 6: Payers & Innovation in Risk Models
Michael:
Where are insurance companies in your mind or in your estimation in terms of the pace of rethinking how risk is underwritten in value recognized versus the actual innovators in care and technology that create value?
Are they far off?
Amir:
Well, I think the insurers that health plans are instrumental to a lot of this because to your point, the funding flows through them.
And I would break down your question maybe a little bit into the different payer categories.
One way to break it down, you can think of Medicare, Medicaid and commercial insurance and I continue to see a lot of innovation there. If you look at the Medicare side, you probably see at some level the most innovation.
We now have close to 50% of seniors choosing Medicare Advantage, Medicare HMOs, you know, starting with the HMO Act of 1973, we didn’t even have it HMOs, let alone in Medicare and now Medicare Advantage.
So that’s a pretty big innovation that in general seniors like.
They like those offerings, they like the bundled benefits, the lower out of pockets and those organizations have also innovative in the care delivery whether it’s contracting with the One Medical’s and others that have taken kind of global risk on these primary care groups, innovative models that are going into the home.
You have a lot of innovation in models both with startups and with the health plans and others directly that are thinking about complex disease populations.
I’m looking at one now in serious mental illness, very complex patients and you’ve seen interesting solutions.
Many of these innovations, if they’re in startup land so to speak, require innovation on the payment model, because hey, just paying a fee for service for a complex patient that just spent two months in an inpatient psychiatric facility may not be the right model to reduce readmissions.
So, you need thoughtfulness on the plans, thoughtfulness on the payment models. I think you’ve seen this in CMS Innovation.
There has an innovation arm ACMMIA Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation kind of across the last few decades thinking about value-based care, thinking about new payment models whether it’s in Medicare or in Medicaid.
So I think we’ve seen innovation there. I think in the commercial side you continue seeing innovation there as well. And here you’ve seen in a growth in companies like One Medical and digital health and other behavioral health solutions amongst others being taken up by commercial insurers, as well as employers.
So I think you’re seeing it.
I think again it takes an ecosystem, it takes a payment model, it takes a delivery model, it takes the consumer engagement model. And I think that’s why a lot of innovation requires these multiple stakeholders. It takes governmental side of things, regulatory innovation as well.
I think we’ve seen some innovation on the regulatory side of FDA, how do you certify or license or support digital devices.
We need you know evolving regulatory environment, certainly Medicare and Medicaid and you know necessarily the healthcare system is careful, right? Because it’s people’s health and well-being and there are so many stakeholders are touched by it that again it’s hard for any incumbent to make dramatic changes, but I think we’re seeing a lot of interesting partnerships and innovation coming across these various parties.
Chapter 7: Technology Adoption & the Consumer
Michael:
Do you see the adoption of technology? One Medical used it. You talked about different layers from AI, natural language processing. As technology advances, you know, part of the opportunity is to put that technology into the hands, right or into the hearts and the minds and the eyes of a broader swath of the population, which will help improve access in equity and healthcare. Where are we in that journey? And at some point, do we face a trust barrier?
Amir:
Yeah, I would put myself in the techno optimist bucket here. Certainly there’s things we have to think about and risks we have to think about. But in general, I mean, do you have a problem when you type a search online and it auto fills and guesses what you’re doing?
You know, do you have a problem when you search online to shop that, you know, you get multiple solutions? You know, we often jump in healthcare to like doctors go away like well, how about, you know, the billing happens automatically? I’m looking at a company now that doesn’t have any human in the loop in terms of automatically addressing billing and appeals and denials and can basically read documents and file forms.
Like does anybody want those forms? Do we need those forms like and getting quicker answers to questions. So I think in general that’s good. I’m looking at another company that uses AI to take noise if you will out of MRI images, so can do the scan. It now has FDA clearance for neuro to do it in half the time with the same results.
Does anybody want to be in the tube longer unnecessarily?
Do we want to drop the cost in half of that scan or increase the access or throughput or maybe give access to other folks who wouldn’t have had access?
I think all of those are positive things. You know we need to make sure we have security, privacy, we will need compassion and caregiving and people. But how do we take burden off of our overworked nurses and pharmacists and doctors?
Do we need extra clicks? Do we need extra workflow?
Why don’t we free them up of some of those burdens and have them spend time engaging with people on behavior change, on their clinical, emotional, social needs, the thing that humans are really good at?
So I’m really optimistic on the role of technology to help kind of as I call it reduce the burdens of desktop medicine that our clinicians do. And you know there’s a lot of I’ll call it electrical and plumbing work to be done.
You know there’s glitzier things, One Medical we can talk glitzy thing but there’s a lot of electrical and plumbing work that you know we can build on top of that’ll make things run more smoothly.
So I think technology is but can and will play a big role in in healthcare making it easier for the for the patient, for the consumer, easier for the clinician, provider, insurer and hopefully making more accessible care and creating access for everyone.
Michael:
I’m so glad you laid all that out because it may be obvious to some people, especially those that are more sophisticated or used to working with technology.
But for the average consumer, right, who isn’t and still there’s a lot of the population who’s not as technology savvy, the aging population is a barrier to technology adoption is the ability to eliminate friction and actually improve judgement versus replace judgement is from my perspective. I think I share with you where so much opportunity exists and there is a lot of friction and just how do you get to see a provider and then what happens after the visit of a provider, not just what happens in the virtual or physical room, that’s all set.
Amir:
That’s exactly right. And you know we saw that at One Medical in our senior population.
As long as you set up the iPad with the one button they pushed, they pushed it right like you know, now you need access to the equipment and people need to either have it provided or afforded it and you need Internet access.
So there are some existing barriers there. But you know it’s like we all learned from other great consumer driven companies like Apple. Well, it’s like if the device works really easily and nicely and you don’t even need an instruction manual, it’s that intuitive.
I guess I could use that, right.
And so you know there’s a lot of instruction manuals needed to access healthcare, right, but if we can simplify that experience for people, you know in, in other parts of our life, we don’t really think about it as technology. We just like, I like this service, it works easily.
I mean that’s what I think we can do with technology and healthcare.
Michael:
And embrace the caregiver, not just the recipient, meaning the family around the person and all the people who are involved in their lives and their well-being because that is a big part of effectively the healthcare system in so many communities.
Amir:
Absolutely. And then yeah, how do we leverage that to make behavior change or help on caregiving and I think technologies allowing us to do that you know in a much more seamless way just like we’re doing this remotely today, right? Like we’re not like oh technology it’s going to be you know, well we can do this through technology it kind of sinks into the background, right?
We’re not focused on the technology; we’re focused on the interactions that we’re having.
I think that’s in essence the same in healthcare. In, in we’re just starting from a place where it has been very unintegrated, disparate organizations.
You need to use your manual to figure out how to get an appointment referral and authorization to schedule, you know, post-discharge instructions, a prescription, right?
But there’s no reason that we need to have it that way.
Chapter 8: What’s Next
Shelly:
Amir, in closing, what do you envision sort of being the next evolution in healthcare?
You’re obviously on the forefront having a lot of interesting conversations and you know, what do you think is needed to continue to foster innovation in healthcare?
Amir:
Well, I I’m excited about solutions that can address the needs of those multiple stakeholders.
And you know I’m seeing things that can make it easier for the consumer, the patient, just like some of the things we’ve talked about.
I did Graduate School at University of Michigan and two researchers there decades ago Pinchansky and Thomas talked about the five days of access, availability, accessibility, accommodation affordability and acceptability.
We can talk more about those things on another occasion. But like how do we do that on the consumer side? We think about the employer. They want to recruit, retain and keep employees productive and not pay more than they need to.
You know, how do we advance employer benefits and employee health and well-being and I’m excited about some of the solutions there.
Then turning back to the supply side, we think about clinicians, you know we have probably globally a shortage of about 10 million nurses over the next decade. How are we going to give them tools to reduce their burnout?
We have a huge burnout in clinicians, physicians. How do we remove those burdens? How do we automate the drudge work or eliminate it?
How do we create ways to do care more flexibly?
Think about new settings, whether you know what used to be in the hospital is now in the outpatient and then that moves to the home and can we make it more predictive and preventive?
So we don’t even have to have that and super excited about innovations in that space.
And then the coordination of care, how do we stitch it together, innovative clinical models, innovative insurance or payment models, How do we coordinate care across a continuum, a network, whether it’s new business models, new technology.
I think we’re now in a reasonably good place to plug and play these innovations into a chassis that’s a little more API enabled if you will, literally with APIs, but also I’d say an ecosystem where there are partnerships and there are contracting vehicles and technologies are interfacing.
And we’ve seen in other industries that we can make the consumer experience better or the workflow experience better.
Healthcare is complicated because of all the multiple stakeholders and insurance and government payers and regulatory and because we do need to make sure we don’t do harm and keep people safe.
But I think we’re going to see amazing innovation in the way care is delivered. I think we’ll continue to see biomedical innovation; in the way we care for patients.
Michael:
Well with that Amir, we want to thank you for joining us today.
It’s fabulous conversation as we always have with you and learn so much. And thank you for thinking about all the different stakeholders.
And you know, I think we would agree fully that you need to consider the holistic 360° view, which is candidly what the Converge series is all about is bringing those different views together. So again, thank you very much. We’re thrilled and look forward to having another conversation soon.
Amir:
Michael Shelly, thank you so much. What a privilege to be with you all today. I appreciate it.
Shelly:
Really enjoyed it. Thank you, Amir.
Outro:
Thank you for listening to the WittKieffer Converge Cast. For more podcasts, articles and insights, visit wittkieffer.com/insights. Again, that’s wittkieffer.com/insights.
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