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TECH/HEALTH PLANS: Interview/Podcast with Mark Ganz, CEO Regence and Luis Machuca, CEO Kryptiq

This is the transcript from an interview I did at WHCC last week with Mark Ganz, the CEO of Regence, the Oregon based Blues plan that operates in the Pacfic Northwest, and Luis Machuca, the CEO of Portland-based health IT messaging company Kryptiq. Machuca is innovative as both and employer and a technology guy, and Ganz is, shall we say, not your typical insurance company executive!

Matthew Holt:  This is Matthew Holt with the World Healthcare Blog, reporting from the World Healthcare Congress, doing a podcast. It’s kind of funky back here because we are in this glass-enclosed blogger’s corner which they put together at the back of the exhibit hall, but they are still setting up the exhibit hall, so you can hear the vacuum cleaners in the background. But no matter, we are on with the first podcast of the day.Today we have got some very interesting folks: Mark Ganz, who is the president and CEO of the Regence Group, which is the big Blue’s plan in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest; and Luis Machuca, whose name I just got wrong again. [laughs]

Luis Machuca:  Machuca!

Matthew:  Machuca! Sorry, my pronunciation is–they never taught you that about proper Spanish accent in the English school I went to. He is the CEO of Kryptiq, which is an IT messaging company. Well, I should let Luis tell you about that. Mark has already been on the podium twice today in two different areas; Luis has just been talking about an initiative that is being run for his employees with Regence. So let’s start there; Luis, give us the quick find out about what are you doing with your employees and how you work with Regence and what innovative things you are doing around employee healthcare at Kryptiq.Luis:  Hi Matthew. So, really what Kryptiq is all about is building tools that enable healthcare transformation. We’ve really, from day one, always felt that transformation starts from the inside out. So before we try to transform the world of healthcare outside, and build tools for them, we wanted to make sure that we were sensitized to the notion of delivering the very best possible healthcare in the most efficient of ways. So we’ve done many things along those lines, starting with reimbursing for email and patient portal enable clinics for employees.More recently, and why Mark is here really, is to align with health plans who also embrace the notion of transformation and the notion of getting more decision in the hands of the employees, and more tools and information for employees to make the right decisions about their healthcare dollars.

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TECH/POLICY: Boston Friday dog blogging

This week I’ve been in Washington DC at the World Health Care Congress and I’ve talked to a lot of people–some on and some off the record. Much of that of course has been available at WorldHealthCareBlog, and some smattering of that has been seen over here at THCB from time to time. But all engrossing stuff—especially getting up close and personal with Jack Wennberg a couple of times.

I then moved up to Boston where I’ve been listening to some smart people and talking with various technology companies. You’ll hear much more about that in the coming days, including a very interesting interview with Joseph Kvedar at the Center for Connected Health at Partners. That’ll be a podcast when the upload cooperates.

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POLICY: How will you get paid? By Paul Levy

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Paul Levy is the President and CEO of Beth Israel Deconess Medical
Center in Boston. Paul recently became the focus of much media
attention when he decided to publish infection rates at his hospital,
despite the fact that under Massachusetts law he is not yet required to
do so.  For the last year and a half he has blogged about his
experiences in an online journal, Running a Hospital,
one of the few blogs we know of maintained by a senior hospital
executive. Today he gives his take on pay for performance.

This is the next chapter in my Wednesday is Student Day series. Rocky, a medical student, asks below: "What is your take on pay for performance, and will it be integrated into BIDMC?"

My
economics professors in college set forth a series of theories and
formulas that described the functioning of the free market. We all knew
that this formulation was unrealistic, in that most markets are
imperfect. There is often "friction" between parties in a marketplace
that result in imbalances between supply and demand, that result in
uneven knowledge between and among buyers and sellers, or that
otherwise gets in the way of an economically efficient equilibrium
condition.

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INTERNATIONAL: Rationing American style

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I don’t approve of health care by anecdote, but there are plenty of loonies on the Canada bashing right who do. And some of them make movies to prove their point. I also think that taking individual stories out of context, compared to using data to describe the actual patterns of care, isn’t that valuable in an intellectual sense. But it sure seems to work in an emotive one.

But let me warn those aspiring Canada-basher film-makers. While you’re out raising your millions, certain pro-single payer groups here have beaten you to it. Apparently the bashers may not know this but there are both people who have problems south of the border, and others with video cameras who’ve met them. I’m awaiting the assurance that this is all the Canadians fault somehow.

The rest of you in the more rarefied crowd at THCB can go back to your regularly scheduled programming.

JOB POST: Policy Analyst/Organizer – Healthcare for All

Come help lead the fight for health care for all!  The Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) and the Institute for America’s Future (IAF) seek a policy analyst/organizer to work on our campaign for universal healthcare.  This person should have experience in developing and working with coalitions and should be a creative self-starter who can help drive progressive issues like universal healthcare into the national debate.  This position will report to CAF’s co-director and will work closely with our online communications and press teams.

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POLICY: Ezra Klein’s The Health of Nations

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Now I’ve met Ezra I can stop calling him the young punk. He has written another excellent review of health care in universal coverage nations, including socialized medicine in the heart of America for our allegedly most treasured citizens.

It’s called The Health of Nations. Go read it.

It’s not entirely without flaws, almost all to do with the lack of good recent data that’s a problem with these comparisons and a need to conserve space. He skips over the UK’s private insurance system which enables the rich to trade up for elective surgery, and the recent increases in spending under Blair which have enable the Brits to buy spare capacity in private countries, (and ramped up GPs pay!). It would be nice to have Ezra do something similar on Japan and Holland (although Japan looks something like Germany plus a Canadian fee schedule, and Holland looks like an Enthoven-wet dream).

What’s also to some extent missing is the changes that have happened recently. Humphrey Taylor remarked to me on Sunday that Americans dont realize how much other systems are changing as ours essentially never does. The Brits have gone to 30% P4P in primary care; the Dutch to individually purchased insurance in a managed competition framework; the Danes and the New Zealanders have added rapid deployment of IT (100% EMR use in ambulatory care); whereas the Australians have added a private top up layer over their traditional socialized  medicine system; the Swiss have their individual mandate.

Of course all of these systems have their problems and all are changing; we’re stuck in 1991. And in fact the VA system, although it works very well it about to be hit with a wave of Iraq war vets who have real problems–and is unlikely to get the resources it needs to deal with them.

And although it goes without saying to those in the know, we should keep repeating that this is the only system that visits not only ill health on the unlucky but often financial disaster too.

TECH/THCB: Health2.0 Conference, September 20th, San Francisco

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I am delighted to tell you all about a brand new conference that THCB is putting on with Etude Scientific , in conjunction with the World Health Care Congress.

It’s a conference and report called Health2.0: User-Generated Healthcare. The conference will be held in San Francisco on September 20th, 2007.

This is going to be a different type of conference. We’ll have RAPID-FIRE DEMOS from innovative companies who are:

> connecting physicians to each other> fostering new online patient communities > designing health-focused search engines> providing health care tools for consumers

We already have a stellar list of speakers from new companies, patient groups, and established payers, providers and pharmaceutical companies. The list is long but it includes consumer aggregators like WebMD, Google*, Microsoft, and new players such as Sermo, Healthline and Organized Wisdom.

We are delighted to have charter sponsors Cisco, the HIMSS Community for Connected Health, and Sermo.

The key question is will HEALTH 2.0 grow into an independent industry sector, be subsumed into the current healthcare system, or create a new hybrid landscape?  Be part of the conversation!

Please go to the web site Health2con.com for details and take a look! Indu Subaiya and I—and our supporting advisory board of Health2.0 innovators—really hope to see you there.

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