William Shrank, MD, MSHS, the chief medical officer of Humana shed light on the company’s efforts in trying to overcome any vaccine hesitancy, both in its workforce and in its insured member population. The Humana executive reflects on the insurer’s 2020 recently released value-based care report and offers thoughts on how the pandemic has changed the operational landscape.
- Importance of value-based care: William Shrank, recently talking to The American Journal of Managed Care discussed the importance of measuring how providers practicing value-based care are faring in terms of lowering costs and improving outcomes compared with those clinicians operating in other payment models.
- Stretching out to members: “We’re providing a considerable amount of outreach to our members, to encourage them to use the vaccine, to talk to them about what we know about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, how important it is for us all to get vaccinated, and also to address some of the real-world considerations, whether it’s challenging with sort of digital literacy and the challenges of actually finding appointments”, he said.
- Acceleration of healthcare: The combination of COVID-19 and an economic recession has only accelerated the transition to value-based care as employers and consumers look for ways to manage to spend, driving the demand for value. One thing Shrank says he’s certain of is that Humana’s providers who receive pre-paid global payments for managing the population of members they serve as patients have been in a far better position to withstand or sustain the strain of the pandemic because they haven’t been worried about maintaining RVUs or volume.
- Rapid transformation: Even more importantly, Shrank contends, these providers were also very well-positioned to rapidly transform, and be nimble and flexible about their care delivery models to serve the needs of members. He adds that Humana is seeing a lot of providers beginning to ask new questions and exploring new ways of contracting, with the goal of creating more resilience in their practice’s finances.
- Consumer-oriented services: COVID-19 has also demonstrated that Humana’s members “have an appetite for more consumer-directed convenient services delivered in the home,” Shrank says, noting that the minuscule amount of care being delivered virtually prior to the pandemic is a thing of the past. “We think that virtual care and more tech-enabled remote monitoring and care in the home will increasingly be part of the solution, and that’s a wonderful way for us to collaborate with providers to help them deliver better and lower-cost care for our members.”
