By Beth Friedman, Sr. Partner, FINN Partners
Twitter: @FINNPartners
Co-Host of FINN Voices – #FINNvoices
If you’re a healthcare provider executive and can only attend one conference a year, please consider the AHA Leadership Summit. I hadn’t attended this event for several years but found this month’s Seattle summit to be insightful, educational, and extremely valuable to my healthcare career. Here’s why.
From Plenary to Breakouts: Information and Inspiration
I attended two plenary sessions that were particularly informative and inspiring. The first was Monday’s AHA Town Hall featuring an up-to-the-minute Washington, DC, update. And the second was Stanley McChrystal’s closing session about understanding risk and mastering the unknown.
The Town Hall featured a panel of AHA leaders discussing important topics such as healthcare workforce, mergers and acquisitions, price transparency, and Medicare reform. Three bipartisan issues may move forward in 2023 including insulin pricing, pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) reform, and greater oversight of the Medicare Advantage program. However, several other hospital and health system concerns remain uncertain. These include extensions for Medicaid redeterminations (the industry is woefully behind), payer abuses of prior authorization denials, and 340B clawbacks for purported overpayments.
Perhaps the most important takeaway from the session was Stacey Hughes’ affirmative response to the question, “Do lawmakers understand hospitals are still experiencing a post-pandemic economic crisis?” Hughes confirmed that Washington legislators truly understand healthcare providers’ dire financial concerns.
From AHA’s lobby efforts to a retired US Army four-star general’s recounting of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, the other plenary session that most impressed me was Stanley McChrystal’s closing session. McChrystal reminded attendees that the biggest challenge to achieving dramatic improvements in healthcare is us. His powerful statement reverberates with me still: “The greatest risk to us, is us.”
McChrystal recognized the fear of change. However, he reiterated that “if healthcare doesn’t change, we all lose.” These are valuable words of wisdom to guide healthcare executives during the transition from fee-for-service healthcare to value-based and pay-for-performance reimbursement.
Three Health Systems Concur: Nine Tips for Population Health Success
Aligned with McChrystal’s closing comments about the evolution to value-based care, another session described how three health systems are working to better manage the patient populations they serve. Representatives from Beth Israel Lahey Health, UW Medicine, Metro Health, and Bamboo Health shared valuable insights and lessons learned in their efforts to ensure equitable health outcomes across their communities.
Each panelist tapped into best practices for people, process, and technology. Here are nine important takeaways.
- Focus on keeping your community well and out of the hospital.
- Employ community health workers (CHWs) to build trusted community outreach and patient/family engagement.
- Break down job functions instead of roles when building your population health management and community engagement team.
- Build expertise to manage government payer populations, especially Medicare Advantage.
- Upskill teams to think in terms of populations, not individual patients or encounters.
- Take a long-term view with your community and community partners instead of a grant-based approach.
- Allow other types of clinicians, not just physicians, to support the patient journey.
- Address patient vulnerability in the moment, using real-time data not retrospective information.
- Become predictive in care coordination to get ahead of illness in rising-risk patients.
Kevin Field, SVP of Growth for Bamboo Health effectively summarized the session with a recommendation for health systems to embrace shared technology platforms. “Open platforms create the network effect and bring communities together. With a shared platform, one plus one equals five when it comes to managing community wellness,” he said.
Healthcare Workforce Gets Focused Attention and Diversity Investment
Inspiration was the key theme at Monday’s session featuring CommonSpirit Health and the Morehouse School of Medicine. The two organizations launched a strategic partnership in 2020 to expand diversity in the healthcare workforce. The More in Common Alliance (MICA) includes $115M in funding over ten years. It has created five initiatives to transform health equity.
Beginning with a stark history lesson of Caucasian versus African American physician to patient ratios, Veronica Mallet, MD, Chief Administrative Officer of MICA, emphasized the importance of clinicians to mirror the communities they serve in race and cultural background. And she described how mistrust in healthcare expands when providers’ ethnicities don’t reflect their patient mix.
MICA’s educational programs seek to solve this workforce diversity issue in healthcare. And according to Mallet, “A healthcare workforce that reflects the community improves care outcomes and community trust.”
Nanette Mickiewicz, MD, President and CEO of Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, California, highlighted the importance of hospitals and health systems to join the MICA effort to improve healthcare workforce diversity. “We’ll never be completely prepared and never completely done, but action is the most important piece.” Dominican Hospital, part of Dignity Health, began their journey in 2022 and plans to launch a MICA residency practice in 2024.
For more information about this session check out Kristine White’s expanded write up in Healthcare Brew.
Time to Save Money in Healthcare: Innovate Your Supply Chain
Jimmy Chung, MD, MBA, FACS, FABQAURP, CMRP and Chief Medical Officer at Advantus Health Partners, spoke Monday morning about the urgent need to cut costs in healthcare. As Medical Director of Supply Chain at Bon Secours Mercy Health in Cincinnati, Ohio, Dr. Chung is an evangelist for physician involvement in healthcare supply chain. His presentation focused on best practices to reduce variability and physician preference in purchasing. The first step is data analysis.
Dr. Chung presented findings of several valuable studies that debunked the myth of physicians’ perceived value in specific high-dollar medical devices and surgical supplies. Outcomes were the same if not better with the less expensive supplies across quality, cost, and patient safety metrics. Physicians are open to cost-saving changes when presented with undisputable data.
These same best practices for clinical purchases can be applied to nonclinical spend, further reducing costs for hospitals and health systems as recently witnessed at Wellspan Health. The organization saved $6M in the first year of managed purchased (nonclinical) services and is on track to save an additional $20M over the next several years.
During a fireside chat with Lindsey Dunn Burgstahler, Vice President of AHA’s Center for Health Innovation, the topic of non-clinical spending in healthcare was again addressed. Bill Kopitke, GM and Head of Healthcare at Amazon Business, reiterated the need for health systems to know what their neighbors (e.g. retailers and hospitality industries) are paying for the exact same non-clinical products and services. There is great opportunity for cost reduction in the day-to-day commodities and services purchased by health systems. Kopitke encouraged transparency, flexibility, and new buying options that rely on real-time data and analytics across industries.
Next Year in San Diego
The AHA Leadership Summit returns to San Diego in 2024. According to AHA conference organizers the crowd will be larger next year. But for this attendee, this year’s smaller gathering was truly appreciated. It was quality over quantity in Seattle—more personalized networking events, longer Q&A sessions, and better peer-to-peer sharing.