Episode Details

Hey, thanks so much to kwebs14 for your super nice review on iTunes the other day. Kwebs wrote:

[I have] learned so much, shared so many episodes with colleagues, clients … and gained so much value from regularly listening to [Relentless Health Value]. … Thank you … for providing the platform for so many that believe that we can consistently do better in healthcare.

Thanks much for writing this. I think our Relentless Tribe is a unique group, and every day of every week I admire your willingness to hear some things that might be pretty hard to hear because they may hit pretty close to home. Dr. Benjamin Schwartz was talking about the podcast on LinkedIn the other day, and he said he doesn't always agree with guests or the discussion but he always learns something and each episode stimulates and challenges his thoughts and opinions.

Yes … to all of this. This is our goal in a nutshell: to help those who want to do better in healthcare to have the insight, the information, the other side of the story, the differing opinion, whatever you need to conceive of the action that you want to take. So, thank you so much to everybody who listens. You are the ones who are going to make a difference, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for doing what you do every day for patients and communities.

Alright, so in this healthcare podcast, we are going to answer an FAQ—a listener question I have gotten a lot lately in various forms. Let me common denominator the inquiry:

What does it mean to be clinically integrated, and how does a provider organization/practice/CIN (clinically integrated network) know if they are actually clinically integrated or not? Also, the corollary to this question, which is how do CINs—or anybody, really—know if they are clinically integrated enough to start thinking about taking on downside risk?

I asked David Muhlestein this question, and then we talk about his answer for 25 minutes. So, like most things in healthcare, it is filled with nuance; but if I was going to oversimplify his answer in one sentence, it's this: Did the practice change how they are practicing medicine in order to drive predetermined outcomes?

This is the litmus test for whether care is integrated. Did practice patterns change within participating entities from whatever they were before to a new way of working? Did the team(s) reorient with a goal to attain some documented patient outcomes, be those outcomes patient satisfaction and/or clinical endpoints and/or functional endpoints?

If no sort of fundamental change happened, probably it's a no on the clinical integration question.

Another litmus test question I've also heard is this: Is the practice looking to get paid more for successes they've already had in upside risk arrangements with kind of little or no desire to transform the practice into a new practice model? If yes, then again, it's gonna be a no on the clinical integration question.

The thing is with all of this … well, let me quote Dr. John Lee, who said this pretty succinctly on LinkedIn recently. He said, "Downside risk fundamentally changes how you have to think as a physician and how you manage your patient cohort. You start thinking about team-based care and using analytics."

Yes … interesting. The point Dr. Lee is making — which is kind of inferred, actually, in the listener question