The most consequential healthcare question of our time is whether the iron grip on policy and the marketplace exerted by the industry’s dominant players – a grip that continues to favor volume-based, opaque quality and cost information, widespread information blocking, and little in the way of quality or safety management – can be broken in favor of high-value healthcare. Decades of lobbying on every relevant healthcare law and rule has facilitated the industry’s capture of regulation, formidably favoring incumbents and putting innovators at an equally formidable disadvantage. The fix is depressingly in.
It is also remarkably comprehensive. Every healthcare sector – supply chain, care delivery, finance and information technology – has devised mechanisms that allow it to extract about twice as much as it gets in any other developed country. Because US healthcare has relentlessly pursued the maximized cost promoted by regulatory advantages and fee-for-service unbundling, our care and cost patterns are dramatically different and more inflated than those in other industrialized countries. Our use of high-cost specialist care instead of low-cost primary care, for example, is far higher.
Every niche within the vast healthcare ecosystem is excessive. Drug companies accept generous development subsidies or tax advantages, then develop breathtaking pricing unrelated to the costs of development or production, for drugs that may or may not work. Electronic health record companies take government subsidies under the promise that they’ll become interoperable, then conveniently walk away from that commitment. Health plans offer networks that include poor performing providers and approve payment for unnecessary and inappropriate care. Market-dominant hospitals pursue exorbitant pricing for routine procedures. “Everything is rigged” was how Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi put it a few years ago.
A better way
When fresh projects like the Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JP Morgan effort come along, some health care prognosticators have responded that their approaches have been tried before and that the innovators may not appreciate the problems’ complexity or the depth of the industry’s influence over the processes. Apparently, as with the Borg, “Resistance is futile.”
Here’s a counterpoint to that view. While the vast majority of healthcare remains conventional,
a growing crop of companies has emerged that is dedicated to delivering and managing care and cost in new, far more efficient ways.
These organizations – think of them as high performers in clinical, financial or administrative risk management niches – are data-, evidence- and mission-driven. Many have devised and then refined approaches that allow them to deliver far better health outcomes and/or lower health costs than conventional methods in high-value niches. They’re typically so confident in their ability to achieve positive impacts that they’ll put their fees at financial risk, against the performance targets they claim they can achieve.
High-value healthcare companies
In musculoskeletal care, for example, a Tallahassee company, Integrated Musculoskeletal Care (IMC) has, over time, developed a conservative, accountable approach to managing musculoskeletal conditions, which are generally about 20 percent of all group health costs and 60 percent of occupational health costs. IMC’s approach successfully intervenes in about 80 percent of all musculoskeletal cases, delivering improvements in pain reduction, Activities of Daily Living and range of motion in half the recovery time and half the cost of conventional orthopedics. The organization is confident enough in its performance that they’ll guarantee a 25% reduction in musculoskeletal spend for the patient population they touch, though their actual savings are generally much higher.
Companies with similar high-value stories have emerged in many niches: cardiometabolic care management, cancer care management, drug management, imaging management, medical claims review, large claims resolution, dialysis management, allergy management, second opinion and so on. They haven’t been well received by conventional health plans, which make more if health care costs more, but they’re starting to find strong reception among employer groups fed up with standard health care.
Advocates for high-value healthcare
Over the past three years or so, a fledgling but rapidly growing community has emerged dedicated to advocating for and deploying high-value approaches. Vendors, benefits advisors and benefits managers for purchasers (i.e., employers and unions) have become convinced that the way forward depends on finding and working with vendors dedicated to high value, and everything that term entails. Employers and union groups of all sizes – from a hundred to 1.5 million covered lives – are actively pursuing these high-performance solutions as carve-outs from their conventional health plan.
There are other signs that the health care change game is afoot. While it remains spotty, going around conventional health plan arrangements through direct contracts between purchasers and provider organizations, is a mushrooming, if immature, trend. An arrangement between General Motors and the Henry Ford Health System has received a lot of attention recently.
But it’s early. It’s questionable how many employers have the internal skill sets and resources to pursue an effort this ambitious in the near term. The same goes for providers. A Modern Healthcare article recently asked whether most health systems have the “chops” – the analytical expertise – required to manage the clinical and financial risks inherent in direct contracting arrangements. That said, direct contracting would lend health systems more control and the promise of more market share, so they’ll no doubt rally their capabilities and continue to pursue this opportunity.
The bottom line
The bottom line is that there is a growing marketplace of healthcare purchasers interested in greater healthcare value and increasingly willing to go around traditional health care arrangements to access it. At the same time, a small, vibrant community of scalable, high-performance, niche healthcare providers is being harnessed by these employers and unions around the country. These two vectors have created a new tension for rank-and-file providers who, on the one hand, fear loss of business to new models and, on the other, fear moving to new models that will yield less money that they’re used to, but will likely jump in favor of value to see where it can lead.
In other words, high-value healthcare is available and succeeding to varying degrees in the market, independent of what the power players can do in policy. If that’s not a reason for optimism about American healthcare, I don’t know what is.
Brian Klepper PhD
Website:
http://www.worksitehealthadvisors.com/
Brian Klepper is the Executive Analyst and Editor at the Health Value Institute. He is also a Principal at Worksite Health Advisors which advises purchasers seeking higher value health care and vendors seeking to deliver high performance. He speaks and writes extensively on clinics, high-performance health care and the management of clinical and financial risk.
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Hello, this blog helped me a lot. Thanks for this information. We are proud to announce that we have launched our Heallify Software for Doctors which provides complete Practice Management for doctors on the fingertips.
We would welcome the alternative and benefits as you stated. But all is driven by the dollar and profits. We hope that inroads by you and others like you will be instrumental in making the change.