In late January, Magellan held its second annual Magellan Open Vision Exchange (MOVE) conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. MOVE brings together a large cast of voices from the healthcare industry to discuss the future of healthcare for patients, plans and providers. Over two days, we heard from private industry experts, government leaders, as well as other subject matter experts and thought leaders both from inside and outside the healthcare industry.

The Future of Healthcare Beyond the Affordable Care Act

Obviously, the continuing debate over the future of healthcare and the Affordable Care Act were a central topic of the conversation at this year’s MOVE. A number of speakers talked about the impact of the Trump Administration’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Former Utah Governor Michael Leavitt, who also served as the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said that while he expects repeal and replace legislation will pass, significant parts will be deferred for three or four years. Brian Coyne, VP of federal affairs at Magellan Health, said that he feared gridlock over the next couple of years.

Managing Transformation in the Healthcare World

One of the key topics discussed at this year’s event was the immediate future of the healthcare industry. After a long period of explosive innovation, there was consensus that disruptive change will continue. Magellan Healthcare CEO Sam Srivastava posited that we are currently in a tech-bubble that is about to burst. The industry is waiting to see which of the early healthcare technology entrants will survive and how technology and healthcare will continue to interface with each other.
Leavitt spoke extensively of the need to manage transformation, especially in healthcare. Leavitt stressed that systematic healthcare change takes hold over three to four decade cycle, and he believes we are less than mid-way through the current transformation. Using an analogy of a cattle herd, Leavitt made the point that you can’t drive a herd too quickly, or you risk a stampede. You also can’t push the herd too slowly or it will meander. Applied to healthcare, the idea is simple but true: If we push change too quickly there will be chaos, but if we fail to adapt and change, we will stagnate. Allowing ourselves to be “lulled into inaction” is a recipe for disaster.

Value-Based Healthcare

A critical area of discussion was the expansion of value-based care. Speakers agreed that demand for value-based care is accelerating. Leavitt said he believed this was true regardless of the Trump Administration’s plans for healthcare. Billy Millwee, President and CEO of BM&A Public Policy, cited broad bipartisan support for the value-based model and agreed that it was here to stay.

Chet Burrell, president and CEO of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, spoke clearly on the approach that his company was taking: “We started and ended with common sense.” He went on to explain that they had built their model with the primary care physician at the center (PCP). The PCP knows the patient best and is therefore in the best position to make decisions regarding who to refer and to whom. By taking this approach, Burrell relayed, CareFirst was able to build a patient centered medical home model that improved care while reducing costs.

Despite the level of change being experienced throughout healthcare, a common theme was one of our industry being grounded in helping people get the high-quality care they need, affordably. This is the essence of why healthcare is our chosen industry and why we are driven to innovate.

An interesting takeaway was that across the conference and speakers, there was a clear common theme: while the ultimate structure of the pay-for-value transformation is uncertain, the movement will continue. Experimentation, promoted by both public and private payer initiatives, will drive innovation and change. Some will be better prepared than others to handle this paradigm shift.

The room at the inaugural Magellan Open Vision Exchange (MOVE) this past March was a sight to see. Filled with a buzz of energy and openness to think differently, Magellan executives, clients and partners gathered in shared pursuit of a better, more efficient healthcare experience of tomorrow. Collectively, the leaders in the room had impact over the healthcare experience for a significant portion of America. Yet, the focus of the conversation was clearly in how to pivot care to be more accessible and effective, one person at a time.

Help One, Help Many

The event kicked off with stories from Mick Ebeling, CEO of Not Impossible Labs, whose commitment to changing the lives of a few individuals has sparked a few of the most impactful innovations in healthcare. From his entrée into healthcare innovation with the eyewriter, helping a graffiti artist paralyzed by ALS to create art again using his eyes, to Project Daniel, a 3D prosthetic printing process that started with the goal of creating an arm for a Sudanese boy, he challenged the group to “recognize an absurdity” and then to “just commit to figuring it out.”

Neither an engineer nor a healthcare expert, his “open source” method for creating healthcare inventions turned heads. He demonstrated a commitment to designing a solution through the eyes of the individual suffering, which made all the difference in his ability to impact lives. He reminded us that he did not have all of the answers -far from it. But asserted that a key point to breaking the mold was to think of challenges as “not impossible.” He reminded us that it would be very difficult to name something that is possible today that wasn’t at one point thought of as impossible.

Healthcare as an Experience

Our client presentations continued to emphasize applications of human-centered innovation in healthcare, sharing approaches grounded in first understanding the behaviors that drive and influence healthcare experience. Key takeways included:

• Remembering that the most common reasons for a hospital stay are the more common ailments of mankind, from childbirth to respiratory and circulatory conditions, musculoskeletal conditions and mood disorders. While emphasis is often placed on advancement in rarer, more specialized conditions, a significant portion of patients can be impacted by anticipating the needs for more routine healthcare experiences.
• Listening to what’s working, and what’s not, disease state by disease state. From crowdsourcing feedback from patients to understand what helped them get better, to creating focused innovation platforms within organizations to spawn creative solutions unencumbered by traditional perceived barriers, we learned of many approaches to closing gaps in the system.
• Speaking to people successfully living with their conditions provides tremendous perspective for recovery and chronic condition management programs. When the formula isn’t as simple as issue identification + treatment = healthy, concepts like peer support become an opportunity to support living well with a physical, mental or emotional challenge by empowering the patient to learn to thrive through peer experience.
• Re-positioning healthcare leaders as “chief experimenters.” It was underscored that healthcare leaders today can’t simply focus on making decisions, they must design and enable experiments to truly push the healthcare experience forward.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of our event recap.

Looking for more information about MOVE, our gathering of healthcare innovators and thought leaders? View media and request an invitation to our January 2017 event. For questions, contact mediarelations@magellanhealth.com.