Episode Details

If you listened to the show with Dan O'Neill (EP359), you would know this already. But let me tell you: If you're a provider, even a provider very confident in your office's ability to confer better patient health, you will still have a super hard time getting off the fee-for-service (FFS) hamster wheel.

Why? Because it's hard to find payer contracts out there which will reward you (the provider) for actually taking care of your patients and to be accountable for the value of healthcare that you deliver. This is a tangled web we weave because, despite some payers offering risk-based contracts, a lot of times there's some IPA (independent physician association) or other "holder of the actual payer contract" who does not pass along these contract terms. These IPAs or health systems even sometimes just keep paying docs or provider offices FFS even if they themselves have a risk-based or capitated or value-based-of-any-kind agreement.

If I actually kept track of the issues raised in the emails I receive from docs, there's one thing that I would likely find amongst the most frequently cited points of consternation: Physicians or practices or CINs (clinically integrated networks) or ACOs (accountable care organizations) want contracts where they can do right by patients. These are the good docs. These are the ones burned out and suffering from moral injury because physicians, PAs (physician assistants), nurses, clinicians who actually follow up and coordinate care and spend time making accurate diagnoses instead of cramming in more procedures … these are the clinicians who want to do the right thing and are also the ones who are getting dinged on performance reports and paid less.

Bottom line here, for a physician practice to transform itself from an FFS machine cranking out volume but not necessarily health or care, the office has to have a high enough percentage of their patients in value-based arrangements to make it actually feasible to transform. It is only when they hit a tipping point of enough volume, enough patients in risk-based contracts that they can afford to be accountable for their results. At that point, yeah, everybody wins—doctors, patients, actually the entire community wins because when a local practice transforms, all of their patients tend to benefit at some level from the new processes and procedures and standardizations and pop health systems that get put in place.

So, let's move forward with this with all haste, shall we? Why aren't we? What's the problem here? Well, there are lots of problems, don't get me wrong. But a big one is self-insured employers on the whole are not offering any sort of accountable care arrangements to the providers in their community. This is 150 million patient lives we're talking about here—a huge chunk of many providers' patient panels. Self-insured employers have a really big opportunity to level up the care in their whole community due to the spillover effect when a provider practice transforms itself because it has enough patients to do so.

But these employers are stuck. They are paralyzed. They are doing the same thing this year that they've done last year, and therefore their whole community is equally stuck in a smorgasbord of suboptimal FFS goings-on.

So, offering accountable care contracts is one thing (a very big consequential thing) that is also one of the five things self-insured employers can do to improve employee health that I talk about in this healthcare podcast with Dan Mendelson. Dan Mendelson, my guest today, also wrote a Forbes article listing out these five things. Here are all five things that Dan mentions in one handy list:

1. Expan