EP189: We've Reached the Tipping Point, With Alex Jung, Global Strategist at Ernst & Young
July 12, 2018
189
31:02

EP189: We've Reached the Tipping Point, With Alex Jung, Global Strategist at Ernst & Young

Alex Jung is a partner/managing director in Parthenon-EY, where she works primarily on growth strategy projects. She helps clients define and implement their strategy and build organizational capabilities to deliver sustainable business results through both organic and inorganic approaches. She is a thought leader in the industry and specializes in asset repurposing and optimizing value propositions. Prior to joining EY, she was the senior vice president of Walgreens Corporate Strategy.

Alex has over 30 years of experience working on strategic growth and risk mitigation engagements. She began her career with Arthur Andersen and after 10 years moved into consulting with Mercer as the leader of the National Health Care Analysis Unit, helping to architect one of the first health data analytics platforms.

Alex has worked globally with Fortune 500 companies and has developed and implemented large-scale strategy, operations, and financial projects. Her domain expertise in health care and life sciences includes hospital operations, pharmacy and drug manufacturing, patient clinical intervention programs, employer benefit plan designs and funding, commercialization, and growth strategies, including mergers and acquisitions.

Alex has been quoted in numerous articles in Forbes, the Chicago Tribune, Business Insurance, Workforce Management magazine, Crain’s Chicago Business, and other industry publications. She is on the editorial board of Inside Patient Care magazine.


01:00 Unnecessary care vs controlling costs.
01:30 The three things Alex looks at when she’s helping a client with their business strategy.
01:40 First, looking at the business model.
02:15 Second, the operating model.
02:45 Capacity constraints vs excess capacity.
04:00 Third, the economic model.
04:30 “We have not performed our duty as an industry to ensure that the dollars that we are collecting in premiums ... are being effectively used to pay for care.”
05:50 “We should be looking at the economic model.”
06:20 “The price is not the problem.”
07:40 “Are those services necessary?”
09:30 “Most employers don’t know what to ask.”
09:55 “Employers can get better about the terms and conditions that they agree to in their contracts.”
12:30 “There’s a huge difference between legal liability and responsibility.”
13:10 “We’re living in a world where social media creates information transparency.”
18:10 The rules to cutting out middlemen to streamline and rationalize payer cost.
18:40 “The economic model needs to be about the value; the service model needs to be about the outcome.”
22:55 “The fundamentals of process improvement changes haven’t changed in 50 years.”
25:40 “If you’re an employer, you have a responsibility to know how your money is being spent.”
27:20 “Scale matters ... volume matters.”
27:55 “You must make concessions.”
29:20 You can learn more by emailing Alex directly at alex.jung@ey.com.

healthcare,pharma,marketing,healthcare cost,ernst & young,parthenon-ey,
|

Episode Support Provided By

Special Thanks to Our 2026 Sustaining Monthly Donors

Kimberly Carleson, Dylan Yahn, Benjamin Light, Matt McQuideAnn Kempski, Spencer Allen, Scott TromanhauserMarilyn Bartlett, 
Steven Elkins, Matthew Bunte, and Lori Smith.

Recent Episodes

EP516: GLP-1s and Cash Pay From the Pharma Manufacturer Point of View, With Ophelia Johnson
Relentless Health ValueJune 17, 202644:0540.35 MB

EP516: GLP-1s and Cash Pay From the Pharma Manufacturer Point of View, With Ophelia Johnson

Listen on Your Favorite App Hello, all you Relentless Tribe members. Welcome to it. Today we have a show that will bend your mind in new directions. And yes, I have a head cold at a very weird time of year. I have trouble apparently doing things like normal people. Anyway, we talk a lot on this podc...

EP515: SNF (Skilled Nursing Facility) Fraud—Or Is It Fraud? With Michelle Cera, PhD
Relentless Health ValueJune 10, 202643:0739.47 MB

EP515: SNF (Skilled Nursing Facility) Fraud—Or Is It Fraud? With Michelle Cera, PhD

Listen on Your Favorite App Hello, all you Relentless Tribe members. Lately, I have been just obsessed with what's hiding in plain sight: the root cause glitches in how American healthcare is built. Not the symptoms now. Not the noise. The actual ground zero. I mean, what we call healthcare in this ...

EP514: Successfully Suing a Health System for Their Anticompetitive Contracts and Also Collecting Damages for Plan Sponsors and Members, With Matt Cantor
Relentless Health ValueJune 03, 2026
514
43:4340.02 MB

EP514: Successfully Suing a Health System for Their Anticompetitive Contracts and Also Collecting Damages for Plan Sponsors and Members, With Matt Cantor

Listen on Your Favorite App Hello, all you Relentless Tribe members. This is the third episode in our legal goings-on trifecta, starting with Doug Aldeen in episode 512 covering what amounts to the main reasons plan sponsors wind up suing their brokers or employee benefit consultants. For a full tra...

EP513: Revisiting Cunning Anticompetitive Hospital Contracts, With Brennan Bilberry

EP513: Revisiting Cunning Anticompetitive Hospital Contracts, With Brennan Bilberry

Listen on Your Favorite App If you are a large employer, union funds broker, fiduciary, or anyone responsible for a health plan that spends half of its dollars on hospital care (which most do), or if you have anything to do with policy or enforcement of policy, yeah … listen this week and next week....

EP512: 3 Kinds of Broker/EBC Rent-Seeking Payment Models—A Lawyer’s Perspective, With Doug Aldeen

EP512: 3 Kinds of Broker/EBC Rent-Seeking Payment Models—A Lawyer’s Perspective, With Doug Aldeen

Listen on Your Favorite App I wanted to talk to a lawyer ’cause, yeah, lawyers are the ones that see stuff that falls the whole way down to the level of legal action. But I wanted to find out what are the main categories of things that wind up in legal land when it comes to broker or EBC (employee b...

EP511: The Tension When Clinical Teams Take On Risk for Policymakers and Others Looking to Rustle Up Future Perverse Incentives, With Dr. Siva and Monica Lypson, MD, MHPE
Relentless Health ValueMay 14, 2026
511
29:3727.1 MB

EP511: The Tension When Clinical Teams Take On Risk for Policymakers and Others Looking to Rustle Up Future Perverse Incentives, With Dr. Siva and Monica Lypson, MD, MHPE

Listen on Your Favorite App Last week, we talked Medicare Advantage with Betsy Seals ( EP510 ), and we talked about finding members who a plan can serve well. This makes sense because Medicare Advantage is a capitated program. In other words, Medicare Advantage plans get paid by CMS a per member per...

EP510: The Impact on You of Medicare Advantage Goings-on (2026 Edition), With Betsy Seals
Relentless Health ValueMay 07, 2026
510
35:3032.5 MB

EP510: The Impact on You of Medicare Advantage Goings-on (2026 Edition), With Betsy Seals

Listen on Your Favorite App I came up with at least one way to tell the difference between making a fair profit and profiteering. If someone makes more money when the patients or members they serve are worse off, yeah, call that profiteering. For a full transcript of this episode, click here . If yo...

Listen and Follow

Sponsored by Aventria Health Group
©2026 BD Bridges LLC. All Rights Reserved.