Listening In (With Permission): Conversations About Today's Pressing Health Care Topics

Suzanne Delbanco speaks with Michelle Zettergren, President of Labor and Public Sector markets and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer for Brighton Health Plan Solutions, a health enablement company that serves as third-party administrator to self-funded employers and other health care purchasers. Michelle heads marketing, customer retention, and business intelligence units for the company, bringing...

Suzanne Delbanco speaks with Scott Doolittle, CFO of Quantum Health, a health care navigation company providing care coordination and navigation support. Scott oversees Quantum Health’s business intelligence units, where he leads a team that validates the company’s actuarial results. Scott Doolittle provides insights into how Quantum Health engages both consumers and providers navigate the eligibi...

Suzanne Delbanco consults Bob Berenson, MD, Institute Fellow at the Urban Institute, on what's going on with telehealth payment policy in both Medicare and the commercial sector and why employers should be paying attention. In May 2021, Bob Berenson testified at the Senate Finance Committee, where he laid out the reasons why fee-for-service is a not a viable way to continue paying for telehealth v...

Suzanne Delbanco speaks with Nate Freese, MBA, Senior Director of Data Strategy at Grand Rounds Health, a health care quality and navigation solution offering employers a data-driven clinical navigation platform paired with patient advocacy tools. Nate leads data strategy at Grand Rounds Health, where his team is responsible for building algorithms that match patients with the right providers base...

Suzanne Delbanco talks with David Vivero, CEO and Co-Founder of Amino Health, a health care financial wellness solution that combines data, design, and consumer-first thinking to curate personalized recommendations for specific care needs. Prior to Amino, David was VP of Rentals at Zillow, a consumer internet company that has transformed the home and rental marketplace through increased transparen...

Suzanne calls Patrick Tigue, the Health Insurance Commissioner for the State of Rhode Island, to discuss the Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner (OHIC)'s initiatives to stem health care cost growth in RI. Rhode Island has established a cost growth benchmarking process to bring greater transparency to the market. They've also created a first-in-the-nation initiative that caps annual growth...

Suzanne Delbanco talks with Thi Montalvo, Health Analytics Practice Leader – Health and Benefits for Willis Towers Watson. In her role, Thi helps employers and other health care purchasers make data-driven decisions for their health benefits strategy. While she’s seen many successful use-cases over her nine years specializing in health analytics, she’s also seen firsthand the many problems that ar...

Suzanne Delbanco calls CJ Stimson, MD, the Senior Vice President of Value Transformation at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), to discuss Vanderbilt’s direct contract bundled payment arrangement for maternity care with Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS). This call serves as follow-up to the webinar hosted by CPR in March 2021, where Dr. Stimson and David Hines of MNPS shared their ins...

Suzanne Delbanco chats with Nathan Counts, a seasoned health benefits professional who recently joined Amtrak as Head of Total Rewards. Previously, Nathan was Assistant Vice President – Global Benefits for a leading telecommunications company, where he actively participated in CPR membership activities, helping shape CPR’s Shared Purchaser Agenda between 2017 and 2020. Nathan, who holds a master’s...

Julianne McGarry catches up with Christopher Whaley, PhD, Policy Researcher at RAND Corporation and one of the lead authors of the RAND's Hospital Price Transparency Study. The study, spearheaded by the Employer's Forum of Indiana, has revealed price variation within and across health care markets by re-pricing hospital and outpatient services as a percentage of what Medicare would pay. By partici...

CPR’s Program Director, Andréa Caballero, chats with Stephen Furia, Senior Vice President, Population Health at Mount Sinai Health System, one of the largest health systems in New York with 3,000 physicians, 400 locations, and a world renown medical school. The Population Health division is the business unit within Mount Sinai that works directly with employers and other health care purchasers, pr...

Andréa Caballero, MPA, speaks with Linda Schwimmer, JD, President and CEO of the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute (Quality Institute) to learn about a pressing issue: the health of New Jersey’s Small Group Insurance Market. This market, which covers employers with 2-50 employees in the Garden State, is on the precipice of a downward spiral. At its height, it covered upward of 1 million con...

Suzanne Delbanco chats with Rick Abbott, VP of Product and Market Solutions at Premera Blue Cross. Premera Blue Cross is a health plan in the Pacific Northwest, serving about 2.2 million members with customers ranging from large tech companies to family-owned grocery stores. Suzanne and Rick discuss if narrow networks, also known as high-performance networks, represent a viable way to lower prices...

Suzanne Delbanco connects with Chris Cigarran, CEO of Imagine Health, an alternative health plan offering curated provider networks in select markets across the country. Prior to Imagine Health, Chris built the employer and government sales division of a wellness company and has also served as Chief HR Officer. To begin the interview, Suzanne lays out a pain point many self-insured employers are f...

Suzanne Delbanco interviews Ashok Subramanian, CEO and Founder of Centivo Health, an alternative Third-Party Administrator (TPA) that emphasizes value-based direct contracting and utilization of high-quality providers. Prior to Centivo, Ashok founded Liazon, a private benefits exchange acquired in 2013 by Willis Towers Watson. Suzanne and Ashok explore how employers can put downward pressure on he...

Listen in as Suzanne Delbanco connects with Alan Muney, MD, MHA, former Chief Medical Officer of Cigna, former CEO of Equity Healthcare, and current health care advisor to multiple venture equity firms. Suzanne asks Alan a fundamental question: how can employers counterbalance the high and rising prices of health care providers? His answer: look at health care spending in a total cost of care form...

Listen in as Suzanne Delbanco chats with Anna Sinaiko, PhD, Assistant Professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Anna Sinaiko studies patient or individual decision making in health care settings, often referred to as consumerism in health care. She and her colleagues are currently wrapping up a synthesis of evidence from the last 40 years of health care consumerism initiatives....

Suzanne speaks with Peter Lee, Executive Director of Covered California Health Exchange, to discover how Covered California looks to accelerate positive change in the health care system. Peter Lee and his team at Covered California are preparing the contract language for the next phase of work with the 11 insurance carriers that participate in the Health Exchange. In preparation for the drafting o...

Listen in as Suzanne dials up Bob Galvin, MD, Operating Partner of Equity Healthcare and former Executive Director of Health Services and Chief Medical Officer for General Electric. As one of CPR’s founders, Bob Galvin knows that employer-purchasers have the power to demand better value from the health system; the question is, how should employer-purchasers proceed now, in light of COVID-19? There...

Suzanne Delbanco chats with Zach Brown, PhD, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan. Zach Brown analyzed the impact of New Hampshire's price transparency website on health care spending. His research, which was featured in the Wall Street Journal (https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-states-effort-to-publicize-hospital-prices-brings-mixed-results-11561555562), examined spending...

Recorded on February 28, 2020. Listen in as Suzanne Delbanco speaks with Marilyn Bartlett, CPA, CMA, CFM, Senior Policy Fellow with the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP). Prior to joining NASHP, Marilyn served as administrator of the Health Care and Benefits Division for Montana’s state employee health plan. There, she led the successful effort to establish a Medicare Plus contracti...

Suzanne calls Michael Chernew, PhD, director of the Healthcare Markets and Regulation (HMR) Lab in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. They discuss his December 2019 publication in NEJM Catalyst, “How Different Payment Models Support (or Undermine) a Sustainable Health Care System: Rating the Underlying Incentives and Building a Better Model,” co-authored with Jermaine...

Can Electronic Health Records (EHRs) help reduce unnecessary health care spending? Suzanne speaks with Scott Weingarten, MD, MPH, consultant to the CEO at Cedars-Sinai and Professor of Medicine, and former Senior Vice President at Cedars-Sinai. Dr. Weingarten's experience implementing EHR reminders across a large health system shows how clinical decision supports embedded into point-of-care settin...

Suzanne Delbanco calls Christopher Koller, President of the Milbank Memorial Fund, to discuss top strategies for containing health care cost growth. They discuss the insurance rate review process that Rhode Island enacted during Christopher's tenure as as the state's health insurance commissioner, and how that regulatory process brought down hospital prices for all commercial purchasers. Christoph...

CPR’s Program Director, Andréa Caballero, calls up MediQuire’s CEO, Emily Chen, to learn why purchasers are choosing to directly contract with providers in order to improve the value of their health care dollars. They discuss what makes a good match between purchasers and health systems seeking to work together, and what challenges self-funded employers and other purchasers may face when pursuing...