As a part of our series Sip & Strategize: Exploring Health Systems Business Strategy, in this session, we discuss how health systems, especially those with a value-based care model, need to be thinking about attracting healthy young patients into their system and how best to do so. Watch the interview, or read below!
Mary: Alright. Welcome back everybody to Sip and Strategize: exploring health business system strategy. Here I am with Dr. Rob Rohatsch, our chief medical officer at Solv. Over the last month or so have been talking about patient acquisition for health systems.
We've covered a variety of topics. But today I wanted to dig into specifically acquiring patients that are maybe younger, and healthier. How should we think about these types of patients? And how do we get them to be aware of systems services?
Dr. Rob: I think it's a great question, Mary. I think today's younger generation is tomorrow's utilizer of healthcare services when they're ill. So if we know that it would really behoove us as a country to keep those folks as a cohort very healthy now, so that later on they're not over utilizing healthcare assets related to being you know, being ill. I think the best way to do that is, engage them and bring them into your health system. Now, before they really need the hardcore services that you, you know, are good at offering later down the road.
From a CFO perspective that changes the dynamics, if you have any type of value-based care going on in your organization. Because if you can preferentially bring in relatively healthy people compared, you know, relative to their age, that changes the dynamics.
If you have a value-based care program. And then if you can keep them healthy because you've engaged them, you brought them in prior to being really sick. Now you can, you know, inject prophylactic-type techniques to make sure they don't get ill. That's a great way to approach a value-based care, business model. And the best way to do that in a health system is probably not the operating room. Right? That's not the place.
We're gonna catch patients, convince them to become part of our system and then enjoy that lifetime value of that household. I think the best way to do that is when the younger folks who don't have chronic diseases to be managed don't have a lot of a lot of illnesses don't have a lot of opportunities for touch points with our health system— but they still sprain their ankles. They still get small aspirations. They still get a little piece of dirt in their eye that needs to be, you know, washed out. And so there are opportunities for health systems to engage, there are still opportunities to have touch point, have a very prescriptive conversation about the need for preventive healthcare and bring them into your system.
Those are ambulatory platforms, so you can do that in an imaging suite you could do that in urban care centers retail health centers any place where folks need same-day next-day care. Bring those assets out where people live, work, and play. That's a great time to engage those folks.
Bring them in, and it changes the dynamics of your whole health system from the perspective of them being relatively healthy, for their age.. So good question it all has to do with where this pendulum is in a value-based care continuum, and all health systems now have some form of that that they're dealing with.
Mary: Thanks so much, Dr. Rob. Yes, and I'll share as well for folks. We have a specific blog about that pendulum of value-based care and fee for service. So thanks for sharing today, and look forward to our next conversation.
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