Introduction and Gratitude
[00:00:00] Stacey Richter: Inbetweenisode, "Thank Yous, and the Intersection of Product Value, Collaboration, and Being a "Giver".
This show is going to drop on Thanksgiving, but whenever you are listening to this, I would suggest taking this moment to be grateful. Everybody has somebody to be thankful for. Colleagues, our mentors, our cheerleaders, our support system, our community, our strategic alliance partners.
To this end, I want to drop a thank you right here to those who have left a tip in our tip jar and or offer up a monthly contribution. From the bottom of my heart, thanks for the support. Thank you to Dr. Scott Tromanhauser, Marilyn Bartlett, Ann Kempski, Dr. Matthew Bunte. Also, thank you to Brian Uhlig, William Gailmard, and Dr. John Lee, Dr. Paula Muto, and Linda Krebs.
To listen to the episode or read the show notes with all the links mentioned, visit the episode page.
Plus everyone else who left a lesser amount. You guys are my village and this matters because as it's been said by me and others a million times, it will take a village to transform healthcare. So, if you haven't already done so, because, yeah, Thanksgiving, consider who is on your own list of villagers to thank right about now in your world.
The older I get, the more I am realizing just how important it is to give thanks and to be grateful. But also, I'm taking a crisp moment here to reflect on who I have helped or tried to help this year. I think about that. Who I am proud to have offered my support to recently. And what is my, I don't know, strategy, my operation, how can I be helpful?
The Importance of Being a Giver
[00:01:49] Stacey Richter: And I'm thinking about this for two reasons that I'm going to talk about here. One of them is for those of us who care about happiness and personal growth and fulfillment and a desire to be as helpful as possible to those around us. That's the first reason. But the second reason to contemplate or quantify who we may have helped is relevant even for those who only do things with ROI, which probably said nobody ever who listens to this particular pod.
But just in case you need a talking point in the future when you're trying to convince someone to do the right thing, who is more of an adder and a subtractor, and a towed up the quantifiable reasons to help someone or else don't do it type of person. So, let's take it from the top.
Personal Growth and Fulfillment
[00:02:29] Stacey Richter: As far as point one is concerned, the personal growth and fulfillment point is just so well known that one of the best ways to feel happy as a baseline is to give to others.
It's the whole why they say there's more joy in giving than receiving. We're humans. We are wired this way. Giving is how relationships thrive so we're not lonely, or have no strength in numbers so we wind up getting stomped on by a woolly mammoth or something.
Relationships where one party only gives when there's a reward, those are not relationships, they are a series of transactions.
Giving is a fundamental underpinning for how communities get built and stay vibrant. So, point one for why be a giver is because ultimately you'll be happier and manage to have true relationships.
Business Benefits of Giving
[00:03:17] Stacey Richter: But as to point two, the business reasons to be a so called giver, well, read the book by Adam Grant, link to an interview about it in the show notes, also an article. Adam Grant quantifies that the most successful people, quantitatively and sustainably, are the ones who are good at giving. So happy to get to say that.
Now look, these most successful givers, and probably the ones who are most happy, also, without fail, set clear boundaries and don't do harm to themselves in the process of giving.
You're not going to be the successful kind of giver by allowing yourself to get stepped on by the takers out there, you know, the kind of people who take whatever they can get from you without any thought or appreciation for you.
But yeah, these boundary laying kinds of givers will win in the end. Takers burn so many bridges, sooner or later, they get a reputation as such.
Media and Communication
[00:04:12] Stacey Richter: Okay, taking a small, but example-rich, sidebar about how this givers and takers dynamic plays out with media in these days of the internet. And I'm saying this as a point to ponder because good communication is how a lot of collective action takes place, ie, how the village gets assembled. So media, meaning pubs or podcasts or newsletters or even great LinkedIn posts, as well as so called traditional or whatever mainstream media. It's how enough people decide to take action because they have the facts to do so.
I mean, this is but one of the reasons why I do this pod. So it's kind of near and dear to my heart to ensure that the people looking to change and transform healthcare have the information or the motivation to do so. A thought about all this was crystallized for me when I was reading Chrissy Farr's recent newsletter, Substack, about business people trying to get written about by reporters or get on podcasts to promote their companies or themselves as thought leaders through the media, you know, so that they can ultimately promote their companies.
Chrissy's point was this, subscribing, ie, giving to publications is a way to make publications sustainable and not sort of desperate to find a different revenue model. And the revenue model that the pub is gonna come up with is charging a metric assload of money for paid promo slots. The example that Chrissy gives is some podcast out there, and I need to take some lessons for this, is managing to charge like $50,000 to be on a conference podcast. Stuff like this.
So, if you're contemplating your giver strategy, as the end of year approaches especially, maybe take a look back through the newsletters or Substacks or pubs that you have read or listened to a lot this year and appreciate it in some way. Then take a look at your budget and your company's budget and divvy up some subscriptions or pledge a couple of bucks.
It's a show of gratitude that goes a long way to help the pubs that help you or others help patients and should make you feel really good and also maybe in the long run, it could be personally beneficial from a business perspective. Or just donate to your favorite nonprofit if you want to get right to it.
So, yeah, long story long, all the more thanks to everyone who has donated to our tip jar, who has written a nice review on iTunes or Spotify, or who interacts with our posts on LinkedIn. Thank you.
This is how pods like this and any of the publications that you like are able to continue. It's also, if you want to get really, why do givers succeed about it? It's through these interactions that like 99% of guests I'd estimate who get invited on a podcast, probably any podcasts come from, or who likely get their name in any publication come from. As I said, this is true for this pod at least, but I would say that who are most hosts or most reporters going to reach out to when they need information or insight and are looking to quote somebody? It's going to be somebody that they know. It's going to be somebody that they like.
Healthcare Value and Collaboration
[00:07:09] Stacey Richter: So, giving the healthcare industry. This is the actual point I wanted to make before I completely distracted myself. And I talked about this at length actually at a recent Thinc360 panel about delivering better patient outcomes.
It for sure has to do with being an aforementioned giver, which I will circle up with in about 60 seconds. Here's what I said on this panel. If I am running around right now at the end of 2024, thinking that I, as the purveyor of almost any healthcare product or service, if I am thinking that I get to dictate to the market what the value is of my product or service, yeah, I'm going to wind up with a big problem.
Value has been, and certainly is now, a bi-directional conversation. But even in that bi-directional conversation, who is most in charge of determining the value of most things, most of the time is the market, not the purveyor. And when I say the market, I don't just mean middlemen such as carriers or PBMs or TPAs or EBCs or maybe even CMS or CMMI or HRSA.
When I say the market determines the value, I increasingly mean the ultimate purchasers of the products or services determine if the product or service is worth it for them to buy. When I say the ultimate purchasers, I mean the ones whose wallets, the money, the dollars is actually coming out of. I mean taxpayers, I mean patients/members, and I mean plan sponsors. Everybody else, ie, PBMs and carriers, et cetera, is a middleman in the transaction.
I ranted about this, you know, show me your real value for 10 minutes, as I said about a month ago on that thINc panel. And then two days later, I read the Trilliant report, which said almost the exact same thing.
Again, value is in the eye of the beholder. This is a direct quote from this Trilliant report. "The winners in healthcare's negative sum game will be those who deliver value for the money." Link to the report in the show notes.
So what does this have to do with being a giver? And why do I think 2025 may kick off the age of the giver? The boundary setting givers, I mean. Well, if value is determined by a bi-directional conversation between the seller and the ultimate purchasers, for that to happen, there needs to be collaboration.
And you know who no one wants to collaborate with? A taker. Someone who is trying to maximize value for themselves instead of optimizing it across the collaboration and for the patient. More on this in a sec.
Givers, I will submit to you, are the ones most able to keep the patient front and center because they have the mind space to do that. Everybody else, the takers, they have other things on their mind.
Like what's in it for them at every step along the way. But it is with the patient that the value will ultimately be realized. So being a giver is good strategy if you're only as good as our quantifiable value. And increasingly, we are only as good as our quantifiable value. I want to read something else from that Trilliant report I just mentioned.
"For years, all stakeholders in the health economy have concentrated on maximizing the value that they can extract from employer sponsored health plans, whether fully or self-funded, instead of delivering value for money. This reality is unsustainable. Health plan transparency reveals inconceivable and inexplicable differences in commercial reimbursement rates, from the same payer, for the same service, in the same market.
Because Delaware's law and ERISA impose fiduciary duties that require CEOs and CFOs to use reasonably available information to make healthcare purchasing decisions, health plan price transparency will inaugurate a new paradigm in the health economy."
The Role of Data and Transparency
[00:10:49] Stacey Richter: Too funny that I also teed that up in the thINc talk that I gave. That there are two factors at play that will change the game. Data, the availability of data, and there's a lot of it flying around right now, and a crisis of affordability amongst the ultimate purchasers of healthcare. But I digress. Back to why being a giver not only makes one personally the most successful, but it also is good strategy because it enables collaboration, which is the precursor to creating a village around what you are doing. Said another way, collaboration is going to be a requirement for the realization and or optimization of value.
How so, you may ask? You may be thinking, I get the bi-directional part because I can, you know, just throw my marketing message out into the market and social media will eat me alive if they disagree. So that part, the communication part is pretty clear. But really, why is collaboration so important for value, ie, why is it so important to be a giver here?
Okay, think about the longitudinal patient journey. How many people or care settings are required in that patient journey for a patient member to derive value from a product or service?
And if one of those entities fails, who else fails? Do I? Like, say I'm a specialist and I discharge a patient and no one follows up and the patient gets readmitted or has a bad outcome. Can I say I'm successful? Will the data suggest I'm successful? Or what about pharma with a drug and most of their patient population winds up with quantifiably expensive GI problems or dies from a secondary cancer?
Maybe those adverse events were avoidable. But they weren't avoided. Point being, nobody is an island here and when I say nobody is an island here, I mean me and I probably mean you or at least think about whether I do.
To this exact same point about nobody being an island or immune from the need to collaborate, which is essential for value to be realized, I was listening to an Advisory Board podcast and they were saying that clinical organizations and MA plans, Medicare Advantage plans, who fight tooth and nail, are not going to be as successful as the ones who figure out how to work together and collaborate for a win win.
And look, I'm going to say that provider/payer collaborations, when done by good people, with mission in mind, can also be a win for patients too. But it will take, obviously, enlightened leaders and individuals who are creative and, you know, not phoning it in on both sides to actually make that happen. Same rules apply here for plan sponsors such as employers.
Rob Andrews talks a lot about this in the Encore that we aired two weeks ago, just how important plan sponsors are to set the bar for providers and ASOs or TPAs who work for them to be held accountable for the patient outcomes that they deliver.
Now, I want to weave these thoughts about givers and value and collaboration together in a really tangible way, or said better, the points about the most successful people being givers and the people who are the best collaborators being givers. Picture a giver who is good at collaborating in your head right now.
Did you picture a person? Or did you picture a company. Like, did a logo or a building flash before your eyes when I said, giver? I'm going to lay high odds a person was pictured in your head, not a company. So with that, let me get to my grand finale thing to think about.
Final Thoughts and Call to Action
[00:14:12] Stacey Richter: It is starting to make me a little nuts and Ann Richardson has been saying this for years, but it's kind of making me a bit nuts when we conflate companies with every single person who works there.
Now, these companies have C-suites whose own behavior and decisions, for sure, in a big way, drive the impact that corporation has, for better or for worse. And there are buses full of people, I'm sad to say, who are what Larry Bauer in a Summer Short last year would term a pawn. You know, people who just do as they're told and patient impact be damned.
But there are lots of other people who work wherever they work and they're knights. Trying, really hard, to live up to their own values while working in a place that may daily kind of crush their spirit. These people might be givers, and I'm a big fan of encouraging them to be patient centric and to align as best they can what they are doing with the values that they have. This may be you, and no matter where you work, call me your biggest cheerleader.
I did a show on the "Narcissism of Small Differences”, and that is relevant here. Link in the show notes. Also manifestos, episodes 399 and 400 if you're looking for more on those topics. But let me sum this up right now.
If we regard everyone to be an enemy, because someone with their same job title or some company that's similar to a company that they work for did something untoward or suboptimal, there's no one left to collaborate with who has much, if anything, to do with like the 99.9% of patients in this country who, again, for better, for worse, get care or are insured by the traditional healthcare industry right now.
Maybe in the future this is going to be different and we'll figure out a way to make the current system obsolete. But if anyone is worried about trying to help patients right now, there is no way to lay out a longitudinal patient journey. There is no way to create the collective action required to push back against the most egregious abuses of power in the healthcare industry without working with people in the healthcare industry.
Now, look, I'm not saying be an idiot and don't recognize that collaborating with a person who may be a giver personally, but works for a conglomerate doing not great stuff. I'm not saying don't keep that in mind. But what I am saying is that if you get two mission driven people in a room, you might be able to figure out a net positive for patients, a net positive that would have been completely impossible without the help of a collaborative partner working wherever they're working.
So, collaborate, give. And thank you to all of you who do both of these things every day, despite the cognitive dissonance and corporate forces and the lack of time and resources that may plague your efforts. I appreciate you very, very much. And it is this gang, the Relentless Tribe, that listens to this show.
It is you who will transform healthcare. It's really you. And again, from the bottom of my heart, I thank you.
My name is Stacey Richter. This podcast is sponsored by Aventria Health Group.
[00:17:02] Rob Marty: Hi, this is Rob Marty, and I’m excited to share one of the many reasons I value this podcast. Stacey, her team, and the subject matter experts who present on the show demonstrate a well known best practice, which is to ensure complex subjects are conveyed in a manner that is actionable and relatable to those of us who may not be familiar with the specific topics lingo. This has always made me feel empowered to learn more about areas of healthcare that would otherwise be outside my wheelhouse. You can support this tribe by leaving a review, subscribing to the newsletter, and, most importantly, inviting others to join the tribe by sharing the podcast with them.