The Connecticut Business & Industry Association (CBIA) held a forum on May 10 focusing on the pandemic”™s disruption of the U.S. health care system and the strategies for moving forward. Titled “Health Care”™s Future: The Post-Covid World,” the event took an extended look at flaws in the health care system, what was learned during the pandemic and the imminent need to quickly change course to avoid a reprise.
The forum, which was held at the Sheraton Hartford South Hotel in Rocky Hill, included three discussion panels, each helmed by health insurance, biopharma and health provider figures.
Preceding the forum”™s first panel was a slideshow presentation titled “What”™s Next for Employee Benefits Packages?” by Teresa Bucello, a partner and Connecticut Health Practice Leader at Mercer, who stated, “We need to demonstrate to our employees that we hear their needs, that we care and that we”™re committed to supporting them.”
Bucello”™s presentation detailed the low morale among the health care workforce, with 77% of employees feeling burn out and more than 91% stating the stress they have felt throughout the pandemic has affected the quality of their work.
Mental health relief was one key area that Bucello said must be addressed in order to reduce the strain felt by workers. According to her, all employees surveyed ranked mental health support as an area of concern, with reduction of cost for treatment being particularly valuable to them.
However, Bucello noted that “over 40% of U.S. employees do not feel that quality mental health care is easy to find.” She recommended that one method to alleviate the dearth in support would be a shift toward supplemental telehealth services, such as virtual mental health advice provided by chat through artificial intelligence, which nearly one-third of employees would welcome in place of the lack of any services.
Bucello argued that providing family-friendly benefits and services would ease the burden felt by employees juggling their roles as health care workers and parents or caregivers.
“They”™re looking for more support in how to not only get benefits that are going to be able to address the needs of their children, but also to ensure that there”™s programs and resources in place to help support them as they”™re navigating these challenges.”
Taking the stage after Bucello”™s presentation were Lou Gianquinto, president and CEO of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield Connecticut; Karen Ignagni, CEO of EmblemHealth; and Susan Halpin, co-principal of the Robinson+Cole”™s Government Relations Group, who acted as moderator for the discussion panel titled “Health Insurance Reimagined.”
The group”™s discussion focused on Covid”™s impact from the perspective of the health insurance sector and the lessons acquired by that sector. The increased importance of long-distance health care was made evident during the pandemic, with the use of telehealth services still used 38 times more than before the pandemic, according to Gianquinto.
To better accommodate this increased preference for telehealth services, Ignagni said, “Not only do you need to have sophisticated data systems, but you have to have modernized (web) portals, because that”™s the first place people will go.”
Preventive care is one critical element that the speakers stressed was needed to move away from its current fee-for-service system, in which health care providers are paid for the number of procedures rendered regardless of patient outcome, and move toward a value-based system, where reimbursement is tied to the quality of a patient”™s health outcome.
“It changes the dynamic of the relationship between the payer and provider,” Gianquinto said about value-based care. “You have the best capabilities of the payer and the best capabilities of the provider working together now for one common goal, which is improved outcomes.”
The second panel discussion, “Innovation Unleashed: Biopharma Accelerates,” was moderated by Vicky Levy, Deloitte Global Life Sciences sector leader, and focused on the new ways in which biopharma achieved quicker results during the pandemic. Raja Mangipudy, senior vice president and head of global drug safety research and development at Pfizer, described how the company launched Project Lightspeed with the aim of creating a vaccine within a short time frame to combat the global outbreak.
“In 2021, Pfizer touched about 1.4 billion people worldwide. That”™s about one in every six people,” Mangipudy said. “We made about 3 million doses of the vaccine, and we are looking to up that number in 2022.”
Paul McCabe, managing partner of Capital Strategies Group, is a representative of the biopharmaceutical industry in Washington, D.C., and related his interactions on the policy side of the equation, and legislators”™ reactions during the beginning of the pandemic.
“We had the opportunity to express what we always stress with policymakers and legislators ”” that to take one drug to market is $2.7 billion and 10 years of research from concept,” McCabe recalled, “and that brought home for legislators and policymakers the importance of the R&D part of this industry.”
On the growing prominence of AI and machine learning in aiding in studies and the development of vaccines, Eric Schadt, president and chief research and development officer at Stamford-based Sema4, detailed the promising developments the technology had and can continue to offer to the industry.
“We were sequencing, drawing blood from patients, we”™re isolating all the different cell types in blood, we”™re doing RNA sequencing,” Schadt said.
“We”™re looking at imaging data that gets done in some of these patients, we”™re looking at their longitudinal medical record data. So millions of features of information on a patient over time.”
The next panel discussion, “Lessons from the Frontlines: Healthcare Transformed,” spotlighted how hospital presidents and CEOs navigated the pandemic and what they had concluded about the state of health care in the country. Steve Cowherd, member at Pullman & Comley, asked Jeffrey Flaks, president and CEO of Hartford HealthCare, if he felt that Covid-19 had made Connecticut health care better. Flaks responded in the affirmative, and added, “In health care, we have to be so much better than when things (were) the way they were. We already are better than normal, and we”™ve learned so much.”
Flaks noted the improvements in the industry and hospitals in response to the pandemic.
“The improvements in health care have been massive. So, things like infection-control procedures, it”™s never been safer to be in a hospital than it is today,” Flaks continued. “We”™ve made tremendous advances. The amount of ingenuity that occurred from all of our colleagues in industry and health care to create safer environments, the innovations and critical care. Who could have imagined, prior to Covid, that we would take one ventilator, and have split ventilator care where one ventilator could be caring for two people?”
Much like the first panel, the “Frontlines” panel delved into what its speakers felt to be a necessity of the industry to shift toward value-based care. Connecticut Children”™s Medical Center President and CEO James Shmerling illustrated how preventive care fits into a value-based realignment by using an example of an asthmatic child treated at a hospital only to be sent back to an unhealthy home, predictably returning to the hospital once again afflicted with asthma.
Now, Shmerling said, “We”™re asking about the home environment and we hear that there”™s lead in the house or there”™s rodents. We can go in and mitigate those conditions.”
Kathleen Silard, president and CEO of Stamford Health, concurred with the sentiment that health care must move toward value-based care with an eye on prevention.
“Thinking about the cost of health care, it just continues to spiral out of control, and the current system is broken,” Silard said, adding there must be a paradigm switch to thinking about wellness, “and the only way that we can do that is in collaboration with our communities, thinking about nutrition and exercise and prevention. And if we don”™t move to that paradigm, most of the health care dollar is spent on treating chronic diseases at the end of life.”
Michael Manna, executive director of JPMorgan Chase, Healthcare Solutions, put a cap on the event, bringing the topics into a broader perspective with his oral presentation, “Health Care”™s Future: The 10,000 Foot View.”
“We acquire health care in the U.S. differently than we acquire just about everything else in the US,” Manna said before listing a large number of codes related to getting a colonoscopy. “The point is the average or even advanced, savvy consumer simply cannot navigate the complexity of a health care transaction completely on their own. We just don”™t have the training.”
Manna then added, “This is clearly not the way we buy other things. It”™s a dysfunctional system.”
