Relentless Health Value

In this health care podcast, I speak with Bill Tanenbaum from Polsinelli. Bill is Polsinelli’s practice co-chair of health care technology and innovation.

Who Will Be the Knights in Shining Armor Who Fix American Health Care? With Brian Klepper, PhD (EP238)

Legislators, Incumbents, or Disrupters: Who Actually Fixes American Health Care? Episode 238.

Americans spend exorbitantly for highly variable results — great care from great physicians in some pockets, and overtreatment, errors, and predatory pricing in others. In this episode, Stacey Richter talks with Brian Klepper, PhD, executive vice president at the Validation Institute, about who's actually positioned to fix American health care: legislators, today's major stakeholders, or self-proclaimed disrupters like Amazon and Haven Healthcare.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✅ Why Brian Klepper points to brokers who aren't secretly compensated by insurance carriers as intrinsic to fixing health care — and where to find a list of them at healthrosetta.org

✅ Why primary care physicians and new primary care models are crucial to Brian's vision for reform

✅ How Brian's background — leading the Validation Institute, the Health Value Institute, Healthcare Performance Inc, Worksite Health Advisors, and formerly the National Business Coalition on Health — shapes his view of who has the leverage to actually change the system

WHY THIS MATTERS

Everyone has a theory about who will fix American health care, but Brian Klepper's answer is refreshingly specific: it's the brokers and primary care models that align incentives honestly, not necessarily the biggest or splashiest disrupters. That specificity matters for anyone deciding where to place their bets, whether as an employer choosing a broker or a system rethinking primary care.

=== LINKS ===

🔗 Show Notes with all mentioned links: Episode Page

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In case you haven’t heard of him, Brian is a health care analyst, commentator, and also an entrepreneur. He’s executive vice president at the Validation Institute, executive analyst and editor at the Health Value Institute, and principal of Healthcare Performance, Inc, a health care strategy and business development practice. He’s also principal of Worksite Health Advisors, a benefits consultancy. Formerly, Brian served as the CEO of the National Business Coalition on Health.

Improving Health Care Value by Pausing and Asking Questions, With Derek Winn (EP237)

"Look Both Ways Before You Cross the Street": A Case for Pausing in Health Care. Episode 237.

Bad things tend to happen in health care when patients are placed on a trajectory and simply follow it — down a road that can lead to unnecessary surgeries, MRIs priced ten times over, and low-quality providers chasing RVUs. In this episode, Stacey Richter talks with Derek Winn, cofounder at Distilled Concepts and consultant at the Business Benefits Group, about treating every health care transaction as a waypoint worth pausing at and questioning.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✅ Why Derek Winn frames every interaction with the health care system as a waypoint on a larger journey — and an opportunity to pause and ask questions

✅ Why payers have a growing opportunity, and maybe obligation, to help employees and patients adopt a "look both ways before you cross the street" mindset

✅ Whether pausing to ask questions could become standard operating procedure, and what that would mean for providers, carriers, and pharma

✅ How BUCA carriers (Blue Cross, United, Cigna, Aetna, and Anthem) factor into how employers might drive this kind of change

WHY THIS MATTERS

A patient who pauses to ask questions at each waypoint in their care journey is safer, both financially and clinically, than one who simply follows the path they're put on. If payers can build that habit of pausing into how they support employees and members, it changes the leverage patients have at every subsequent decision point.

=== LINKS ===

🔗 Show Notes with all mentioned links: Episode Page

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Bad things have a propensity to occur in health care when patients are placed on a trajectory and then simply follow the yellow brick road—to an Oz potentially filled with unnecessary surgeries, MRIs that cost 10 times what they should, low-quality providers chasing RVUs (relative value units) like their paychecks depended on it … I could go on.

Today I speak with Derek Winn, cofounder at Distilled Concepts and consultant at the Business Benefits Group. His distilled advice is to recognize that every transaction with the health care system is a waypoint on a larger journey—and also an opportunity to pause and ask questions. Payers of health care have a profound opportunity and perhaps growing obligation to help employees/members/patients, first of all, to recognize that a “look both ways before you cross the street” modus operandi is safer from both a monetary as well as an actual patient safety standpoint. Derek and I discuss the ways to make this happen, when/if it will become standard operating procedure, and the likely impact on providers and insurance carriers and Pharma if employers choose to take this route.

By the way, BUCA stands for Blue Cross, United, Cigna, Aetna, and Anthem. We use this acronym in the interview.

You can learn more by contacting Derek on LinkedIn atDerekWinn or by visiting distilled-concepts.com.

Derek Winn is a lead consultant at the Business Benefits Group, where he has consulted clients regarding employer-sponsored benefit programs for nearly the past decade.

Customer Experience Advice From JetBlue's Playbook, With Liliana Petrova (EP236)

"When Building to Simplicity, It Has to Be Perfect." Episode 236.

Customer experience drives revenue growth by double digits over laggards, even in markets with little competition — because when the experience is bad enough, customers just leave and don't come back. In this episode, Stacey Richter talks with Liliana Petrova, CEO and founder of The Petrova Experience and former director of customer experience at JetBlue, about translating airline-grade customer experience discipline to health care.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✅ Why Liliana Petrova says "when building to simplicity, it has to be perfect" — and why perfect means perfect from the patient's point of view, not the organization's

✅ How Forrester and Gartner research shows customer experience driving real revenue growth, with 89% of companies now competing on customer experience

✅ Why the physical design of a waiting room — like a front desk sequestered behind a tall glass window — sends a subliminal message worth rethinking

✅ How Liliana's experience at JetBlue, an industry as complex, regulated, and safety-driven as health care, translates directly to health care settings

WHY THIS MATTERS

Health care has historically underestimated how much customer experience matters, treating it as a nice-to-have rather than a driver of whether patients stay engaged with their care at all. Liliana Petrova's outside perspective from the airline industry shows that simplicity and design choices — down to the shape of a front desk — carry real weight in whether patients feel like partners or supplicants.

=== LINKS ===

🔗 Show Notes with all mentioned links: Episode Page

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In this podcast, Liliana Petrova, CEO/Founder at The Petrova Experience, translates her experience as director of customer experience at JetBlue to the health care industry. Her advice is practical and designed to actually work in environments as complex and regulated and driven by safety concerns as the airline industry—and also, coincidentally, health care.

The Right Providers Maximize Health Care Value — So Who Are They? With Suzanne Clough, MD (EP235)

Why Cutting the Bottom 10% of Practices Delivers Outsized Returns. Episode 235.

Roughly 70% of back surgeries are unnecessary, and medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US — which makes getting patients to the right doctor a matter of real consequence, not just convenience. In this episode, Stacey Richter talks with Suzanne Clough, MD, chief medical officer at ArmadaHealth and cofounder of Welldoc, about how to actually measure physician quality in a sea of dirty, non-interoperable data, and how ArmadaHealth aims to be a GPS getting patients to the right doctor faster.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✅ Why simply cutting out the bottom-performing 10% of practices in a network can deliver outsized returns on both cost and quality

✅ Why measuring physician quality is so hard given dirty data, poor interoperability, and outcomes data that rarely captures what actually matters to patients

✅ How ArmadaHealth is trying to function as a GPS for health care, helping patients get to the right doctor more quickly

✅ Suzanne Clough's background cofounding Welldoc, the first FDA-approved digital health platform

WHY THIS MATTERS

Getting patients to the right doctor isn't just about convenience — with unnecessary back surgeries and medical errors at the rates they are, it's a matter of avoiding real harm. Suzanne Clough's work points to a practical lever payers already have: identifying and steering away from the lowest-performing slice of their network, even before solving the harder problem of comprehensive quality measurement.

=== LINKS ===

🔗 Show Notes with all mentioned links: Episode Page

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Here’s a vital question, “How do you make sure that the physicians your employees or members are seeing are high quality in a given area of focus?” Getting to the right doctor matters when you consider that something like 70% of back surgeries are unnecessary and medical errors are the third leading cause of death in this country. And also because, as Suzanne DelBanco put it in EP224, if a payer simply cuts out the bottom performing 10% of practices, the returns are outsized from a cost and quality perspective. The challenge is how to actually accomplish this. How to measure quality in a sea of dirty data and noise and whatever the opposite of interoperability and aggregated data sets is. With the confounding factor also that outcomes are rarely if ever included in data sets, especially when you consider that the outcomes that matter to patients are really the outcomes that count.

Today I speak with Suzanne Clough, MD. In a former life, Suzanne was a co-founder of Welldoc, the first FDA-approved digital health platform and also featured on EP102 of this podcast. Now, Suzanne is the chief-medical officer over at ArmadaHealth, a company that aims to become a GPS for health care helping to get patients to the right doctor quicker.

You can learn more at www.armadahealth.com

Dr. Suzanne Sysko Clough, MD, is Chief Medical Officer of ArmadaHealth, a health and data science company that navigates consumers to quality health care providers using big data, AI, and proprietary quality algorithms that together produce 360-degree profiles of physicians. The platform enables precision matching of physicians with patients based on diagnosis/condition and nonclinical attributes. Before ArmadaHealth, Suzanne was a co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of WellDoc, the first FDA-approved digital health platform. Dr. Clough completed her medical training in internal medicine and a fellowship in endocrinology at the University of Maryland Medical Systems and served as an assistant professor in the Division of Endocrinology as well as Medical Director and as the Founder and Medical Director of the Center for Weight Management and Wellness.

Customer Experience Drives Trust, and the Two Together Drive Outcomes, With Claire Sporton (EP234)

Who Will Be the Next JetBlue of Health Care? Episode 234.

Trust in US hospitals dropped 8 points in the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, with pharma, biotech, and insurance holding at levels that were already low. In this episode, Stacey Richter talks with Claire Sporton, SVP of customer experience innovation at Confirmit, about why customer experience and trust are inseparable — and why a 5% increase in customer retention can translate to a 25% increase in business returns.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✅ Why trust in hospitals, pharma, and insurance carriers matters for whether patients return and whether organizations can actually collaborate

✅ Seth Godin's distinction between feeling "transactional" versus "relational" — and why patients can tell the difference

✅ Why a 5% increase in customer retention can drive a 25% increase in business returns, and what that might mean if applied to health care outcomes

✅ Claire Sporton's take on who could become "the JetBlue of health care" by building trust through customer experience

WHY THIS MATTERS

Without trust, entities across health care — pharma and health systems, carriers and health systems, health systems and patients — can't build the kind of relationships that actually improve outcomes. Claire Sporton's framing suggests that customer experience isn't a soft metric bolted onto care delivery; it's the mechanism that makes coordinated, trusted care possible in the first place.

=== LINKS ===

🔗 Show Notes with all mentioned links: Episode Page

✉️ Enjoy this podcast? Subscribe to the free weekly newsletter

🫙 Support the podcast with a small donation to the Tip Jar

🎤 Listen on Apple Podcasts

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=== CONNECT WITH THE RHV TEAM ===

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