We couldn't even find an attempt to answer the freaking question in the literature-we did the study
5/ Why?
In 2008, we thought that there were 3 problems that had to be solved simultaneously- payment that rewards prevention, information systems oriented to prevention, and practice workflows.
I spent over 10 years focused on the last 2 (reader, it didn't work)
6/ w co-founder @matkendall (& now @ONC_HealthIT Dir. @mickytripathi1) we homed in on moving doctors from paper to electronic health records, adding population health into those (document/billing) systems, and on the hand-on support they would need to convert practice workflows
7/ It didn't work
During my time at @ONC_HealthIT EHR adoption skyrocketed, but blood pressure control didn't budge.
Hearing this @POLITICOPulse podcast recorded w @ddiamond after I left government, I'm struck by how disillusioned I sound.
8/ I was looking for some window in American healthcare where preventing a stroke would be more profitable than treating it.
"Accountable Care Organizations" could be it, but I was convinced that physician-led ACOs-and primary care-were the answer, not hospitals & health systems
9/ 10 yrs later, it is now, ironically, conventional wisdom that " "Risk-taking primary care" and "Physician Enablement" are a once-a-generation business opportunity.
We have many "fellow travelers" in this space (FFS is the competition) but we have carved a particular path
10/ Each of these strategic decisions were made deliberately, to maximize the societal reach and scale we could have
Each connects to the others
We would serve exiting practices, with as much of their panel as possible, and stay true to our north star
We don't try to make money through (zero-sum) FFS negotiations b/w plans and practices
12/ And to make it easy for practices to join us, we wouldn't charge them (or payers) for technology or coaching or contracts or capital reserves
We aren't "vendors" we're partners
We give them what they need at scale, which means outstanding economics for them (and for payers)
13/ Shedding value means that you make the flywheel spin faster
We also have an awesome virtuous cycle at play:
The more practices we have the easier to get global risk contracts w plans (you need minimum size)
The more contracts, the easier to sign practices
Around🔄Around
14/ When I was just starting Aledade, I used to do a parlor trick.
"Assume you can get 100 primary care docs together
..and they each care for 2,000 patients
...and each patient accounts for $5,000 a year in medical costs
How much spend do they influence?"
(math)
15/ that's right (even if it seems like a crazy number of zeros)
100 PCPs can be a billion dollar business.
If they actually believe that they can manage the total cost and quality of care for their patients
PCPs have been neglected for so long, making that mental leap is hard
16/ But HOW??
It can seem overwhelming, so we shrink it down to what every PCP can agree is just good primary care.
All the results we've accomplished have been based on these Core4™️ advanced primary care practice competencies.
(and yes, we're incubating several Core More)
17/ And yes, building cloud-based software that can be the Operating System for practices' population health work has been key to making these competencies scale
Each data source adds unique value
Actionable Insights >> Data
Workflow is everything
Outcomes are what matters
18/ We are the best engine for accumulating "the opportunity to make a difference" (lives under management) but where we are truly differentiated is in supporting practice behavior change, even (especially) if they don't work for us.
The science and art of aligning 💙,🧠, and🛣️
19/ We launched 100 practices across 5 very different states in 2016- our "reference cohort"
Year after year, they have widened the gap between themselves and their peers in outcomes that matter
More primary care visits
👉 fewer ER visits
👉 fewer hospital admits
👉 lower cost
20/ The Medicare Shared Savings Program has been the most transparent value-based program, saving billions of dollars, even if (excluding Aledade) average savings have been ~2% of total cost of care vs benchmark
Aledade practice cohorts keep getting better, faster 📈
21/ This is how the money works for a mature cohort
We have a budget (benchmark), say $1.5B
Claim payments are deducted
Whats left (10%=$150M) is value we've created
The plan keeps $45M
Our practice partner get $53M
After paying for direct costs ~$47M "platform contribution"
22/ That gross margin goes towards the cost of practice outreach, and building our technology and data platform, plus the regulatory, and legal and finance and all the other overhead expenses.
For years, that was paid for by our investors. But we're now profitable.. and growing
23/ We can now invest more and more into the most important part of our mission- improving care, reducing suffering, and reducing costs.
Which brings us to the big news yesterday... our acquisition of an amazing company- Iris Healthcare
A perfect mission and culture fit
24/ We worked with them for over 3 years to provide comprehensive advance care planning for the most complex patients in our practices.
They spent hours with patients and their families, explored very difficult scenarios, documented, and followed up
The results were terrific 👇
25/ There may be more opportunities like Iris
There are many terrific "point solutions" that tackle a thorny problem well but face challenges in targeting the right patients, engaging them, and getting paid for the value they create, in fee for service, #BetterTogether w Aledade
26/ It's not often that you find the intersection of
a really huge problem
a disruptive wave that scrambles the status quo
a "product" that really works- at scale
a platform that can be built on
and an incredible team that will not quit.
That defines an "interesting company"
27/ I am so grateful for 2 things:
An alignment between business and mission that makes it possible for our company to speak with the same authentic voice to our practices, business partners, policymakers, employees, and investors.
Where we are now with vaccinations, therapeutic- and with the Omicron variant- is very different from March 2020, or December 2020, or even October 2021.
We were not wrong to urge NPIs when the population was spike naive, and R0 was 2.5
2/ in fact, these actions, painful as they were, bought us time for the vaccine rollout, and saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
But we can't insist on the same prescriptions when the disease has changed, for fear of being called "inconsistent", or "giving up"
3/ Omicron is less deadly than the Wuhan strain for unvaccinated, and 10x less deadly for the vaccinated
We have the vaccines and the boosters and the meds and the tests and the good masks to protect the elderly and the immunocompromised, - if we can just marshal them.
1/ The biggest challenge with the Omicron surge is hospital and ICU capacity, w a lot of infections in a short period, and health care workers out with infection
Anecdotally, many hospitals aren't cancelling elective procedures yet-because of finances (Anyone have data on this?)
2/ Could the remaining relief funds from @CMSGov be conditioned on hospitals deferring elective surgeries? ie framed as compensating for foregone elective procedures?
3/ I'm mindful that deferring these procedures has real-life consequences for patients and their families, in addition to hospital finances
But the risk to everyone (including those getting elective procedures) of overwhelmed and burnt out medical staff is very real.
1/ A big part of understanding the relationship between COVID cases and mortality is understanding the age structure of the waves
I've been looking at NYC "Respiratory" syndrome for ED visits (I was a member of the group that pioneered its use for public health 20 years ago)
2/ During prior influenza seasons, NYC would have up to 1,000 extra emergency department visits a day, much of the increase driven by babies and children (low prior immunity). Their share of ED visits would increase from ~20% to 40%
COVID19 was a completely different story
3/ Every day the number of ED visits rose higher. I remember seeing the first break in the relentless increase, and barely daring to believe that we had reached a peak. It was March 28. There were an extra 3,000 ED visits that day.
1/ The rate of Omicron infections in NYC is unprecedented.
I'd estimate 100,000 infections occurred ... yesterday. Maybe 300,000 over the past 10 days.
1% hospitalization rate would mean 3,000 admits to come over the next few days
I hope it's much less than that (86 so far).
2/ Complicating matters, after driving down influenza (and RSV) to undetectable levels last year, we let up on social distancing, masking, and they have come back
So at least part of the increase in ED visits and hospitalizations will be due to influenza/RSV (especially in kids)
3/ On the other hand, using COVID-specific hospitalizations may be overcounting "incidental" cases among those admitted (or dying) for other reasons, especially if very high attack rate for Omicron
They looked at UK COVID cases with (n=208,947) and without (n=15,087) the dropout associated w Omicron, and perform regression analyses to see what factors could predict Omicron
Date, for one
3/ for example, to predict whether a case is Omicron, you could find a clue by whether they are a reinfection (breakthrough).
There were 4,100 reinfections, but 36% of them were in the dropout group, compared w only 7% of the total cases. (OR 6.55 after controlling for all else)