Listening In (With Permission): Conversations About Today's Pressing Health Care Topics

Andréa calls Dr. Vikas Saini, President of the LOWN Institute to discuss their Hospital Index which measures a hospital's social responsibility, examining how hospitals rank in terms of health outcomes, value and equity. The index is comprised of 53 different metrics, Dr. Saini explains how they collect and analyze their data.

This podcast is sponsored by Embold Health.

Julianne calls up Doug Aldeen, ESQ an ERISA Healthcare Attorney and General Counsel to discuss the Reference Based Pricing (RBP) landscape, specifically how RBP has evolved over time.

Doug recounts his experience defending RBP companies from lawsuits and saw the evolution from uniform level reimbursement to variation depending on the market.

"Ultimately, the reason these facilities were coming after the RBP companies is it's a market threat...you're now a price maker, instead of a price taker."

Sarah Hostetter, Managing Director, Physician and Ambulatory Research at Advisory Board speaks with Suzanne about the landscape of physician practices. Whats happening with acquisition of physician practices? Are there any independent practices left? Why do some physicians choose to join larger practices? Sarah digs into the data and sheds light on how the changing landscape affects physicians themselves, but also the market at large.

Suzanne speaks to Marilyn Bartlett about the National Academy for State Health Policy's (NASHP) Hospital Cost Tool and her role in creating it. NASHP’s interactive Hospital Cost Tool provides anyone from policymakers to researchers with insights into how much hospitals spend on patient care services. The tool also shows how those costs relate to both the hospital charges (list prices) and the actual prices paid by health plans.

Suzanne calls up Gloria Sachdev to discuss the Employer's Forum of Indiana's (EFI) latest tool, Sage Transparency. Sage Transparency is a tool that brings together public and proprietary data on hospital pricing and quality. It gives users access to price and quality data for thousands of hospitals across the United States—and it’s free!

Suzanne calls up Karen Sepucha, PhD, director of the Health Decision Sciences Center in the General Medicine Division at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School to discuss shared decision making.

Shared decision making is "really focused on the physicians and the doctors and health care team bringing in what [they] know about the clinical evidence...having that doctors expertise [applied] to this patient sitting in front of them and also bringing out and really recognizing the expertise of the patient in terms of their lived experience."

Suzanne calls up Nick Reber, CEO and Founder of Garner Health to talk price transparency, analytics, and quality.

So what do the data say? Well, they confirm a lot of what employer-purchasers are feeling at the moment.

"We're seeing just about the fastest rate of health care inflation in our data ever."

What's a solution? Price Transparency Data.

We have all of this price transparency data, what are we going to do with it?

Well, we need a new model if we're going to get consumers to use it. We have to get to them upstream, we have to make it really simple, and we have to change the incentives so that they save thousands of dollars by getting with the program.

Suzanne calls Jen Porto, Manager of Leader Education at Headspace Health to discuss strategies on developing a culture of mental wellness at work.

Jen and her team launched a leadership education program to equip managers with science-backed practices to drive cultural change in organizations, support mental health and well-being in the workplace and improve employee engagement, productivity and retention.

Suzanne calls up Dr. Doug Salvador, Chief Quality Officer at Bay State Health and Board Member of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM). Suzanne and Doug discuss the prevalence of diagnosis errors, steps to take to learn from them, and how to prevent them in the future.

"You need to have some experts, in your organization in diagnosis and the diagnostic process. You need to set up learning systems, where failures of the diagnostic process or these opportunities are identified and reviewed by teams, including patients...you need to put in place standard processes for diagnosis...we need to get better at it overall in health care."

Suzanne calls up Thi Montalvo, VP, Analytics and Reporting at Transcarent, and Elodie Olsen, Senior Director North America Health Analytics Practice Leader at WTW to talk about wrestling data away from certain health plans, the reasons behind the proliferation of point solutions, and sometimes sneaky trend guarantees.