The first wave of this COVID-19 pandemic has been totally reactionary. Don’t get me wrong: That does not detract from the Herculean effort made by hospitals and clinicians who have thrown everything they have at this—and more. But I don’t think that anyone would disagree that if we had enough PPE (personal protective equipment) and ventilators—you know, like, proactively—we’d be in better shape.
So let’s stay ahead of the second wave of this pandemic, which is going to happen when, as Marty Makary put it in episode 267, the backlog of patients who were scared to or unable to get care for a few months creep out of their homes. What happens when patients who should have gotten a tumor removed or had a colonoscopy because of GI bleeding or felt the symptoms of a heart attack but did not get timely care?
In this health care podcast, I am speaking with Eric Bricker, MD, from AHealthcareZ; and we’re talking about how the post-COVID-19 new normal may shape up. One way to conceive of what health care will be moving forward is to look at how stakeholders are impacted by the pandemic right now and what action steps they’re taking right now, because to a nontrivial degree, the moves made now will have an outsized impact on their success trajectory in the near term and long term in the months and years to come.
I was super thrilled to have the chance to speak with Dr. Bricker. If you haven’t watched his videos on LinkedIn or at AHealthcareZ.com, you should definitely go and check them out.
You can connect with Dr. Bricker on Twitter at @DrEricB and on LinkedIn.
Eric Bricker, MD, is an internal medicine physician and former cofounder and chief medical officer of Compass Professional Health Services. Compass is a health care navigation service that grew to 2000+ clients, including T-Mobile, Southwest Airlines, and Chili's/Maggiano's restaurants. Compass was acquired by Alight Solutions in July 2018. Alight is a 10,000-person employee benefits and HR outsourcing company that separated from Aon in 2017.
Dr. Bricker has since started AHealthcareZ.com, with 170+ health care finance videos with approximately 90,000 views per month across all platforms. He is also the author of Healthcare Money Campfire Stories.
02:48 How COVID-19 is impacting insurance carriers and payers.
06:16 How COVID-19 is going to affect payers with self-insured employers.
07:59 “The carrier’s revenue is going to go down because of layoffs.”
09:05 Other helpful or harmful COVID-19 factors to insurance carriers.
12:37 The risk to pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) revenue.
13:14 The financial stability of recent health system mergers.
14:03 The potential “cash crunch” for health systems because of COVID-19.
17:01 The issue with telehealth revenue right now.
20:57 EP251 with Dr. Kimberly Noel.
21:32 “In health care, you add technology and the price tends to go up.”—Stacey
22:02 “Telemedicine allows for geographic competition.”
22:19 How COVID-19 will affect specialty from a revenue perspective.
24:31 “An economic truism … one person’s spending is another person’s income.”
27:06 “Pain causes change.”
28:01 Do population health outcomes go up or down after COVID-19?
29:15 The high number of moves from high-deductible plans to Medicaid and how that will affect patient outcomes.
32:38 EP267 and EP268 with Dr. Marty Makary.
33:02 Coming out of this peak, what hospitals need to be thinking about.