Latest / CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered. / Improving Employee Access to Better Healthcare w/ Garner Health CEO Nick Reber
Transcript
- 0:00How do you find the best doctor?
- 0:02A word of mouth is the usual way, but shouldn't we be able to use data to drive such an important decision?
- 0:13Hi, everyone.
- 0:13I'm David Williams, president of Health Business Group.
- 0:16Today's guest, Nick Reber, is founder and CEO of Garner Health.
- 0:19He's leading the charge in transforming healthcare navigation.
- 0:23Well, before we hear from Nick, I want to take a moment to thank my surgeon, Dr.
- 0:27Nora Fullington, for giving me the very best experience in my recent hernia surgery.
- 0:31I know that's a funny thing to talk about, but I am truly grateful for her.
- 0:35And this month is really all about gratitude.
- 0:37And along with Dr.
- 0:38Fullington, there's someone else we don't get to thank.
- 0:40Enough.
- 0:41That's ourselves.
- 0:43It's sometimes hard to remind ourselves that we're trying our best to make sense of everything.
- 0:47And in this crazy world, that really isn't easy.
- 0:50So here's a reminder to send some thanks to the people in your life, including yourself and your surgeon.
- 0:56BetterHelp offers entirely online therapy that's designed to be convenient, flexible, and tailored to fit your schedule.
- 1:02Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge.
- 1:09It's helpful for learning positive coping skills and how to set boundaries.
- 1:13It empowers you to be the very best version of yourself.
- 1:16So whether you're dealing with stress, anxiety, or simply seeking personal growth, BetterHelp connects you with licensed therapists who can support you on your mental health journey.
- 1:26Let the gratitude flow with BetterHelp.
- 1:28Visit betterhelp.com slash care talk to get 10 % off your first month.
- 1:33That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash care talk.
- 1:39Nick, welcome to Care Talk.
- 1:40Thanks, David.
- 1:41Appreciate you having me.
- 1:42I want to talk about inspiration in particular.
- 1:44What inspired you to start Garner Health?
- 1:47Awesome.
- 1:48So I, my background, worked in the investment world was early investment partner at Bridgewater Associates, which is a hedge fund run by Ray Dalio.
- 1:57And, and I actually had some back issues myself and I was, you know, it sounds like you were dealing with something somewhat similar recently and And I actually got misdiagnosed, had a surgery in my thoracic spine when I really needed one of my cervical spine, had a complication or revision surgery, had about five of them.
- 2:13And somewhere along the way, you know, I got wheeled out in a wheelchair from one of my neck surgeries, which turns out I was actually fine.
- 2:22I didn't really need, I could walk.
- 2:23I was fine.
- 2:24And I started, and the hospital said, no, no, no, you have this wheelchair.
- 2:27It comes along with your surgery.
- 2:28paid for by your insurance.
- 2:30And I was like, but I don't, I don't need it.
- 2:31I don't They're like, no, it's free.
- 2:32You have it.
- 2:33And it's like a thousand dollar wheelchair.
- 2:35And I'd sort of just started pulling the thread on this and started to figure out who actually pays for all this stuff that I probably don't need, you know, and all these misdiagnoses and bad outcomes.
- 2:44And, and that really led me into, into trying to solve healthcare stuff.
- 2:48And ultimately I then started a health plan called Oscar health was on leadership team there helped build that out across the country and, got it to study the data for about a million members of fully insured high cost quality.
- 3:02How do we improve outcomes?
- 3:04And.
- 3:04And really I got convinced that the single biggest lever you can pull in improving someone's health outcomes over time and controlling cost is getting them to the right individual doctor.
- 3:15And then I looked at both the data that was out there to help people with that.
- 3:20And just as importantly, the financial incentives and the sort of conflicts of interest that exist in the healthcare system.
- 3:26You know, you have all these issues with how hospitals negotiate with insurance companies and and they don't really allow accountability at the individual doctor level.
- 3:35And so really that's the project we've been working on at Garner for the last few years.
- 3:39It's interesting.
- 3:40I think when you start off with the back surgery, that is a good one to start with for somebody who's outside of the healthcare space.
- 3:47Cause a lot of people get back surgery because it just like the back is killing them and they go to a surgeon.
- 3:52And as my dad used to say, surgeons like to cut.
- 3:54So they usually be recommended for a surgery of whatever type of surgery they do.
- 3:58And it may or may not help.
- 4:00And you can see about certainly your back surgery.
- 4:03It's a very a lot of regional variations depending on where the you know where the surgeons are and what you get So I'm glad hopefully you finally got the right surgery.
- 4:10Your hernia surgery is a little bit different.
- 4:12But even there what happens is apparently about 20 % of people that go in for hernia surgery are actually they just have a groin strain and only a surgery at all and they should go into to PT and there's also a lot of a lot of use of imaging, which is actually not useful and sometimes counterproductive and expensive.
- 4:33And then people end up going to the wrong surgeon, often a general surgeon instead of somebody who's a hernia specialist.
- 4:37So I feel your pain, although I don't feel your pain because I feel great from my hernia.
- 4:42Amazing.
- 4:42Well, anyway, I'm glad you're you and Dr.
- 4:44Fullington have made some great outcomes.
- 4:47So let's talk about this data driven approach, which is what I understood that you've got at Garner Health.
- 4:54What sort of metrics do you use?
- 4:57And on the one hand, sounds like it's a really good idea.
- 4:59On the other hand, you're thinking, why hasn't this been done before?
- 5:02Everybody wants to know who the best doctor is for them.
- 5:04Totally.
- 5:05Yeah.
- 5:06So there have been varying attempts in certain ways over the last, let's call it 30 years, really since the 1990s, as people started to be able to pull data and do SQL queries to figure out which doctors are high performing.
- 5:20Really though, the methodologies really haven't evolved much since then, if you believe it.
- 5:25And the reason for that is a twofold.
- 5:27One, the data has really been locked into mostly the insurance carriers for a long, long period of time.
- 5:33And so there were really only a few entities with anywhere approaching the sample size of data required to do the longitudinal analysis to really understand quality costs, outcomes, long-term health, all of those things.
- 5:45And then the second thing is that partially because it's been locked in a few of those entities, those methodologies have really been stale.
- 5:53in my view, and obviously I'm slightly biased here, but everything has been built around these sort of episode groupers.
- 5:59If you look at what your insurance carriers do, if you look at what most care navigators or data analytics vendors do, they all have this thing called an episode grouper, which is really simply just a cost per patient.
- 6:11And it turns out that's an incredibly blunt instrument to evaluate a doctor on because doctors see lots of different patient types with severe hernias and less severe hernias and all of these sorts of things.
- 6:23And so what we've done is I think very, I know it's unique and we certainly think it's a lot better than what's been out there is number one, we've aggregated three quarters of all the claims data in the country in a longitudinal way.
- 6:36So we have hundreds of millions of patients worth of data being tens of billions of encounters.
- 6:41And then two, importantly, we don't use those legacy episode groupers.
- 6:46Instead, we've written a whole language that allows us to measure each individual decision and each individual health outcome.
- 6:53generated by a provider.
- 6:54It's a library of over 500 individual metrics.
- 6:57And that allows us to be a lot more, pardon the pun, but surgical and precise in terms of how we actually evaluate providers, both on the total cost of care and the quality or health outcomes generated.
- 7:10Yeah, I'm thinking back to what you described with your background in terms of being at a hedge fund before.
- 7:14And if I compare health care with finance, Yes, pretty different.
- 7:19So in healthcare, you can get away with having these, you know, groupers that somebody came up with and wrote a paper about in the 80s and still use that and get away with that.
- 7:26And a hedge fund, if you use some sort of heuristic or rule of thumb or something that, you know, somebody came up with a bunch of time, you're going to lose out.
- 7:32You're going to lose all your money and get fired pretty quickly, which leads to another part, which is also related to accountability.
- 7:38So a lot of times the pushback actually in the healthcare field has been aside from the idea of the methodology is also about individual accountability.
- 7:47So a lot of the discussion is also about, you it's not fair to evaluate an individual physician.
- 7:52You should just look at the team or, something a little broader because it's a team sport, et cetera.
- 7:56Whereas a patient often want to know like which doctor, not like which group overall.
- 8:02anyway, that you're, it makes sense to me describing a little bit more of a maybe financial approach to a healthcare, a public health issue.
- 8:12Yeah.
- 8:12I mean, and it's.
- 8:13Exactly.
- 8:14think largely a lot of the pushback from the physician community has been the sort of black box and unfairness of the old methodologies.
- 8:22And that's why you've needed to get evaluated on a group or a larger sample set.
- 8:26It's, there's not, there's only 50 patients or, or the methodologies, you know, are bad.
- 8:32Now there are a few areas where you actually, where care is really delivered in a group.
- 8:36Like if you have breast cancer and you're getting a mastectomy, like you need both a plastic surgeon and a general surgeon and both need to be evaluated together.
- 8:44Great, that's a minority of cases.
- 8:46The vast majority of the time, patients think about it to your point, hey, who am I gonna see?
- 8:51I'm gonna see Dr.
- 8:52Jones, Dr.
- 8:53Smith, Dr.
- 8:53Fullington, like, know, for my pain.
- 8:56And what's fascinating is that doctors practice so differently, even in the same office, right across the hall.
- 9:02And so you actually, if you can get the data to actually measure that and you have the sample size, it really yields way better results for patients if you can do it that way.
- 9:13So, you know, in this, so in the hedge fund, I feel it's easy also to measure if you're doing well or not at end of the year.
- 9:18If someone doesn't say, that a real dollar in the account or not, you know, it's pretty clear.
- 9:22Now here, we want to look at patient outcomes.
- 9:25And can you say, you know, if you use your methodologies, are the patient outcomes better and our costs lower?
- 9:31Is that something you can measure?
- 9:32Yeah.
- 9:33So, so the...
- 9:35Cost is actually somewhat similar to trading a hedge fund book.
- 9:38In other words, there's randomness, just like in markets, there's randomness.
- 9:41But at the end of the day, we have a book of nearly 1,000 clients now, and we can look at the total cost of care of those people.
- 9:50And we put our fees 100 % at risk if we're not delivering total cost of care trend reduction.
- 9:54And we're one of the few folks to do that.
- 9:57And so we actually, in that way, actually looks a lot like a hedge fund, at least for us.
- 10:01And we can get fired by our clients just like we could back in the day.
- 10:05the quality situation is a little more, I don't know, up to interpretation.
- 10:11And there I think you need the approach that we take, which we think makes sense is to create something of a basket.
- 10:16So the first thing is if you're reducing utilization, it probably means people are healthier.
- 10:21Usually if there's fewer complications, if people are spending fewer days in the hospital and there's lower cost as a result, that's pretty good.
- 10:28But of course you could lower costs without improving quality.
- 10:32And so...
- 10:32The basket that we use is a set of things like the number of ER visits, the number of hospital days, the number of patients with controlled versus uncontrolled disease.
- 10:42So for us, you're seeing a 10 % reduction in ER visits in the first year.
- 10:46You're seeing a 20 % improvement in patients with chronic disease, such as diabetes being controlled A1C levels.
- 10:53So we have a basket of those things that we look at from sort of post-procedure things, complication rates.
- 11:00to longitudinal health outcomes like ER and hospitalization rates, to even in more longitudinal sort of chronic disease stuff.
- 11:07And generally you're seeing a 10 or 20 % improvement in all of those top line metrics when you put in Gartner in the first year to 18 months.
- 11:15Great.
- 11:16now, of course, one of the things that's screwy about healthcare is this third party reimbursement.
- 11:20So the user and the customer are different and you've got strange incentives in place.
- 11:28So one of them has to do with the relationship between the patient who's not hiring a Garner directly, and they're working for their employer.
- 11:37And so if you're now trying to get someone maybe to switch doctors or to go to a different doctor than they would have done otherwise, which is great if I know that you're motivated to help me out.
- 11:48That's why the patient outcomes matter.
- 11:50But since you're being employed by my employer, there may be a concern of, is this just like a cost cutting thing?
- 11:58How do you build trust in encouraging patients to go in the right direction that's ultimately going to be right for them, but also good for their employer?
- 12:07Yeah.
- 12:08So a couple of things.
- 12:09The nice thing about it is, about health care, is that it's really very different than shopping for, I don't know, clothes or cars or houses.
- 12:19Lower cost goes with higher quality in health care.
- 12:21And so that's just a nice sort of outcome.
- 12:25The healthier the people are, the fewer ER visits, the fewer complication rates, et cetera, the lower the cost is going to be.
- 12:31And because healthcare has been so inefficient for such a long time, there's not even any correlation between the price of a surgery.
- 12:39So if you take your, back surgery, your hernia surgery, the price of just that surgery and the complication rate on that surgery or the outcomes after that surgery.
- 12:48So there's no relationship whatsoever.
- 12:51And if there is a relationship, higher quality equals lower cost.
- 12:54So that allows us to create a sort of an economic model that aligns with, I think, the moral model that we want to have, which is, hey, if you're just really high quality, let's not make sure that surgery cost is not too high, but we'll make recommendations in that way.
- 13:08And then the other big thing from a patient engagement and trust building is, so number one, we have to be transparent, we have to describe that to folks.
- 13:15Here's why we chose Dr.
- 13:17Jones, and we can get all the way down to the complication rates, the readmission rates, like this is literally why we chose this provider.
- 13:24And I think being transparent in our data methodology that is sort of bottoms up really helps that.
- 13:29So it's not a black box.
- 13:30here's all the complication rates.
- 13:31Here's how we did it.
- 13:32This is why we chose Dr.
- 13:33Jones.
- 13:34And then the second thing is that we feel like it's important to share some of those savings back with the employee and give them choice.
- 13:41So in the Garner model, you keep your network, keep your SIGNET and United Anthem network.
- 13:47Garner layers on top of it so you're not losing access to doctors.
- 13:51But we're saying, hey, if you want to participate in the savings from getting higher quality, great, we're going to work with your employer and we're going to cover all or most of your out of pocket if you use the tool.
- 14:01That's your choice.
- 14:02You don't have to.
- 14:03But we think you're going get a lot higher quality care.
- 14:06It's also easier to book an appointment and all that stuff.
- 14:09And then you get to participate in the savings by getting your out of pocket covered.
- 14:13And so we think that's a model that builds trust and sort of helps people just understand what the incentives are.
- 14:20that if you want high quality, here's some extra money.
- 14:22If you don't, you want to ask your neighbor, like that's all good too.
- 14:25You're not going to lose access.
- 14:27How do you deal with some of the fragmentation and lack of interoperability in the system?
- 14:31Cause on the one hand, there's the issue about these groupers and the right methodology.
- 14:36And on the other hand, it's about getting access to high quality, timely and thorough data.
- 14:43How do you work through that?
- 14:45Yeah.
- 14:45So interestingly, The most of what we do is based on healthcare claims data.
- 14:51We do have some other, everything from mortality data to some EMR data, et cetera.
- 14:57Most of what we do is based on the claims data.
- 14:59And the interesting thing is that claims data has actually been interoperable for 40, 50 years.
- 15:05And the reason for that is because it's the only way everyone gets paid.
- 15:11And typically data systems follow the money.
- 15:13So EMR data and electronic medical records You know, those things have been incredibly messy, unstructured, no real way of having standardization.
- 15:24Obviously some AI stuff is helping on that a bit, but the record of payment is incredibly precise because hospitals don't get paid unless they do it that way.
- 15:34And CMS has done a good job of reasonably organizing that stuff.
- 15:37And so you can actually get very good.
- 15:40I don't want to overstate, understate the amount of work it's necessary to clean, validate, to duplicate.
- 15:45But if you have different claims data sets and you have good modern cloud infrastructure and data governance on top of it, you can actually create a really cool longitudinal record.
- 15:56And the claims data actually, as we've gone through it, has about 90 % of everything you'd want.
- 16:0290 % of the metrics we'd ever want to create are in there.
- 16:05Obviously, you can look at complication rates.
- 16:07You can look at, this doctor doing physical therapy before surgery?
- 16:10You can look at, is this the right drug for this patient under these times?
- 16:13you can look at their long-term health outcomes.
- 16:15And so, you know, I think that is the mechanism by which we've sort of been able to sidestep some of the interoperability issues in the healthcare world.
- 16:23You know, it's interesting what you say about the claims piece goes back, you know, the interoperability even earlier than the groupers, if I'm keeping track of my decades here.
- 16:31And, you know, there's a lot of excitement when you have the electronic medical record data come in, because that's really the clinical record.
- 16:37And I think what you find is partly what you're getting at is when you look at those records, if you can get a hold of them, since they're not required for payment, they may have a lot of great looking fields, but they're not necessarily filled in and they may not be filled in consistently.
- 16:51Even something like blood pressure, which you think would be standard is actually different across the different EMRs.
- 16:57On the claims side, so people have to fill in everything that's needed in order to get paid, but the clinical use for it is sort of a secondary use.
- 17:07It's not what it was designed for.
- 17:09And so how do you, is there an issue about when you analyze that data, you're picking up things about how people bill and what their financial strategies are as opposed to what's really clinical or is that not something you have to worry about?
- 17:24Yeah, very good question.
- 17:25And an important one is we really get into the weeds on this stuff.
- 17:29If you look at it, about 60, 70 % of the metrics don't actually require much nuance.
- 17:35You can't fake a complication.
- 17:36The patient is in the ER room after the surgery.
- 17:39You know, things of that nature, there's actually a ton of that.
- 17:42You can't really fake doing physical therapy before surgery for the most part, et cetera, or not doing it.
- 17:49But you know, you can do, let's see, you know, we're looking at our cardiology metrics and we're looking at providers who are doing in our directamies for, you know, stenosis of the artery stenosis.
- 18:06And there can be severe case.
- 18:08or not severe case.
- 18:09And that's actually a provider billing question.
- 18:11And severe cases, the literature says it's okay to do this procedure.
- 18:14And the less severe cases, it's not really appropriate for those patients.
- 18:19And so there, what we have to do is look at how providers bill in general.
- 18:25And okay, wait, you provider were the one doctor in the whole country that had 100 % of your patients be severe cases?
- 18:32I don't believe you.
- 18:34And so when there's the 30 %...
- 18:36of the cases that do have a little bit of what you might call clinical or billing judgment.
- 18:41If you have enough sample size, you can look at the patients that these providers see, you can really quickly spot providers who are basically up coding stuff and you're like, all right, I don't believe you anymore.
- 18:52And there's a variety of statistical adjustments that you can do in those cases.
- 18:56So again, that's about a third of the time we have to do that sort of thing.
- 18:59That's a relatively routine thing for us now.
- 19:02But it does require vigilance and management and to know which case are you in.
- 19:06Are you in the hard and fast case or are in the provider judgment billing case?
- 19:09And then we handle those things a little differently.
- 19:12Okay.
- 19:12But it's a significant percentage of the claims and you've got, and I think one way to look at it is you could either throw up your hands and say, well, we don't look at that.
- 19:19Let's go and try to delve into all the clinical records, but it's actually easier and probably more systematic and more reliable to make these adjustments that you're talking about on the billing side.
- 19:28We believe we've gotten some access to EMR data, et cetera.
- 19:31And we actually think there's, you know, if we'd spent the massive amount of work necessary to do natural language processing, to codify all that stuff, it would only give us like a 7 % lift.
- 19:42Honestly, when, you know, it's a few subspecialty cancer things and a few other things like that, that you're like, that should be useful.
- 19:49But for the vast majority of specialties, it honestly doesn't provide a whole ton of lift for us.
- 19:54I mean, it's a proof for what you're doing and other parts of the business that are a little different with some of these real world evidence companies that actually spend a ton of money to try to take the EHR data, even if it's actually their own EHR that they own like Flatiron and make it better.
- 20:08And they can show that they can make some improvements.
- 20:10They can't show that they can make money by doing that.
- 20:13But that's a topic for different podcasts.
- 20:15So let's talk about value-based care because another approach to what you're doing in terms of improved outcomes and lower costs would be value-based care.
- 20:25Are you an alternative to value-based care?
- 20:27Do you layer in on it or are they just kind of independent?
- 20:30Well, I'm going to be perhaps a bit off consensus on this.
- 20:35know, value-based care can mean, of course, a lot of different things.
- 20:39I actually think if you want to change health care for the better, value-based care is a bit of a distraction.
- 20:45We can work great with providers that are in value-based care or not.
- 20:48groups that want to go in that direction or not were very flexible.
- 20:52But when I started my career, one of the things I did at Oscar was negotiate our hospital system contracts around the country.
- 20:59And I had a couple of hospital systems, let's say one of your top three academic medical centers where we had a 50-50 full risk deal, big deal, joint venture, cetera.
- 21:10And I went to them and I gave them some data on some of their providers around excessive use and high complication rates.
- 21:17And I said, hey, we're in this risk deal.
- 21:19Don't you want to change your behaviors and like, you know, eliminate all these crazy extra MRIs you're doing or complications you're having on surgery.
- 21:27And they went through it with their CFO and said, basically, hey, we've thought about it.
- 21:31And honestly, we believe we're economically better off just keeping doing what we're You know, that ultimately, A, you're not that huge a part of our book, but even if you were, you're going to ratchet us down.
- 21:42And in three years when we renegotiate, if we shrink the pie, Well, we're just going to the same share of a shrunken pie.
- 21:51And what's fascinating about what we're doing, and so I sort of got learned, okay, that doesn't quite work.
- 21:55Now what's fascinating at Garner is because we, are I think one of the fastest growing employee benefits, and we have a really active referral program where our data tool is being used by primary care referral, physicians for referrals.
- 22:09We now control the care journeys of a couple million people.
- 22:12And we're now getting hospital systems around the country.
- 22:15knocking on our door saying, hey, what do I have to do differently to get some of that referral volume from you?
- 22:20And then we can say, well, actually, we now have hospitals that are actually, you believe it, changing their physician compensation based on our data.
- 22:29And that, think, if you really want to change healthcare, my view is that it's much more about controlling volume than it is about paying differently.
- 22:38Because the payment, honestly, whether I pay you this way or that way, it's still just a payment.
- 22:42The bigger thing is Well, how do I get more volume to you?
- 22:47And if I can reward you for good behavior with more volume, the world will change.
- 22:52It's sort of like Uber, know, if you want to get bottled water in the back of Uber, don't pay people to get bottled water, just give them a five-star system and say the only way you get passengers is by getting a five-star.
- 23:01And so that's my philosophy on it.
- 23:04Anyway, maybe a little alternative, but I think that'll be our path forward as an industry.
- 23:08So last question for you, Nick.
- 23:11You've been at this for a while.
- 23:12You've seen a lot of things in healthcare.
- 23:14There's a new administration coming in.
- 23:16We're at an interesting point at the economy and you've got a lot of baby boomers that are retiring.
- 23:21What sort of advice would you give somebody who's starting a healthcare company now, other than not to do it?
- 23:26Yeah, I certainly got that advice from many, many folks.
- 23:32I think just really making sure you understand, I had a lot of folks say, I'm going to build something on top of or in spite of the existing managed care dynamics of healthcare.
- 23:45And I think that stuff rarely works and if it works, it works at very small scale.
- 23:50So I think the real key is to really spend the time to understand how does, how do health assist, like really what drives the profitability of providers, of health systems, of insurance companies, what are their real incentives?
- 24:04How do those negotiations work?
- 24:05How does the money flow?
- 24:07You know, like what are the incentives really at the end of day?
- 24:11What is the barriers to entry and why are there such tremendous network effects of those businesses today?
- 24:17And really understand how your business plays in that very complicated economic landscape.
- 24:22And I think the successful businesses are the ones that have a real idea on that.
- 24:27And the ones that are okay but maybe don't ever scale are the ones that hit a wall because they're like, the health plans no longer want me to exist or the providers no longer want me to exist and I need them to want me to exist.
- 24:39And so I think that type of research is really, I think really critical, particularly in the healthcare world.
- 24:45Well, that's it for another episode of Care Talk.
- 24:47My guest today has been Nick Reber, founder and CEO of Garner Health, which is using data to find the best physician, improve outcomes and save costs.
- 24:55Nick, thanks for joining me today.
- 24:57Thanks, David.
- 24:57I'm David Williams, president of Health Business Group.
- 25:00If you like what you heard, or even if you didn't, please subscribe on your favorite service.