Our former CFO, Ben Bowman, and I got together (social distance style) to talk economics. It’s not as boring or nerdy as it sounds… we sat down to talk more about the changes we’d like to see in healthcare economics.
Here are the four big changes we’d like to see in healthcare:
I’m at the center. No, not me, Jon Pearce, but me as the patient. Instead of the focus being on payers and providers, the patient is at the center of the experience and it’s built with their best interests in mind. Take for example Uber and what they did for transportation. They put the rider at the center of their model. No more waiting for a cab, wondering if you’ll need cash or credit. They built the experience around the rider and it worked out well for them, didn’t it?
Decade duration health insurance. A single policy for each decade of your life. The current state has us operating on annual policies, which don’t make any sense. Yearly policies don’t allow for mapping how overall health and wellbeing works—during a calendar year, we can’t predict when we’re going to get sick. A shift to decade duration puts the patient’s health at the forefront, not the payers and bookkeeper’s ease of mind.
Decoupling healthcare and employment. You have to unbundle it. So much of the economy is built on this model that to actually make decoupling happen is really tricky. When people lose their jobs, they don’t lose their health, so there has to be a solution that supports people when they are in transition periods of their life.
Get rid of claims. They’re too complex! Why can’t payers get paid on the overall health of a person? You don’t need CPT codes for that. Measure blood pressure, emotional state, BMI (or equivalent) and cardiovascular health. These types of measurements demonstrate overall health where a CPT code shows that you did something.
Sounds pretty simple, right? Tune in to hear all of our hopes and dreams for the future of healthcare economics.
