Hello, all you Relentless Tribe members. Hey, thanks for being here with me every week, some of you every single Thursday. Give yourself a little round of applause, maybe silently and in your own head, depending on where you are.
But yeah, you matter. You being here matters. There's real power in this tribe of ours, and I'm not kidding to take a moment to thank yourself for being who you are and showing up in the way that you are.
For a full transcript of this episode, click here.
If you enjoy this podcast, be sure to subscribe to the free weekly newsletter to be a member of the Relentless Tribe.
Many do not, and here's the problem with that: If we blame all of our problems on intractable, inevitable structural constraints, we lose our own agency.
That is a brilliant insight from the episode with Lisa Rosenbaum, MD (EP519) from a couple of weeks ago. And it's not only important because you being here is also you taking back your agency and our collective it-takes-a-village opportunity to fix the healthcare industry in this country, but it's also the perfect lens for today's conversation because we are unpacking the exact action/reaction chains.
We talk about two today that were both very much a part of creating the healthcare mess that we're in and how we can actually take action to stop the chain reactions that are still actively chain reacting, still actively kinetically decaying or whatever the science word is.
Having this information and understanding how these action reactions work is what it will take for us to figure out how to reverse the direction of these things, make healthcare more affordable, higher quality, better outcomes instead.
My guest today is the legendary Dr. Eric Bricker from AHealthcareZ, and together, as I just said, we are tracing these two distinct but very adjacent action/reaction chains that have collided to spark a fire of pretty staggering healthcare inflation and kind of the opposite of the Quadruple Aim.
This is Relentless Health Value. Thank you so much to Aventria Health Group, which is our founding sponsor.
Thank you so much to our series underwriter in 2026, Payerset. And I just wanna let you know that Payerset just posted about 129,000 self-funded employers' allowed amounts on their Web site for free. So, do go over to Payerset's Web site if you want to check that out.
Also, thank you so much to Patient Rights Advocate for a really nice donation this year.
With that, let's get to it. Here is my conversation with Dr. Eric Bricker.
Also mentioned in this episode are AHealthcareZ; Lisa Rosenbaum, MD; Cristin Dickerson, MD; Aventria Health Group; Payerset; Patient Rights Advocate; Elisabeth Potter, MD; Graham Walker, MD; Offcall; Brian Klepper, PhD; Suhas Gondi, MD, MBA; Upswing Health; Health Here; ZERO.health; Aligned Marketplace; Green Imaging; John Quinn; and Tom Nash.
For a list of healthcare industry acronyms and terms that may be unfamiliar to you, click here.
You can learn more at ahealthcarez.com and by following Dr. Bricker on LinkedIn and YouTube.
Eric Bricker, MD, is an internal medicine physician and former co-founder and chief medical officer of Compass Professional Health Services. Compass is a healthcare navigation service that grew to 1.8 million members across 2000+ clients, including T-Mobile, Southwest Airlines, and Chili's/Maggiano's Restaurants. Compass was acquired by Alight Solutions in July 2018.
Dr. Bricker then went on to found AHealthcareZ, which provides 400+ healthcare finance educational videos with 100,000+ subscribers/followers across YouTube and LinkedIn.
Additionally, Dr. Bricker serves on the board of directors for Frontier Direct Care and provides consulting services to a variety of clients.
00:00 Introduction to this episode.
01:14 EP519 with Lisa Rosenbaum, MD.
01:34 An overview of today's episode.
03:11 Payerset's post on self-funded employers' allowed amounts.
03:37 The conversation with Dr. Eric Bricker.
03:59 The first action/reaction chain.
07:03 How AHA's success in lobbying plays into its ability to outpace inflation.
08:56 Instagram posts (video 1 and video 2) by Elisabeth Potter, MD, on the AMA.
10:22 Instagram post by Graham Walker, MD.
12:31 EP437 with Brian Klepper, PhD.
14:48 The second action/reaction chain.
21:57 How all of this impacts the patient.
28:14 EP523 with Suhas Gondi, MD, MBA.
28:24 Purchasers as a sleeping giant.
29:36 Physicians as the second sleeping giant.
31:26 Site-neutral payments: who wants them, who doesn't.
33:33 Dr. Bricker's advice.
35:46 AMA article on the narrative of CPT.
36:57 EP525 with Cristin Dickerson, MD.
Recent past interviews:
Click a guest's name for their latest RHV episode!
Yashaswini Singh, Mark Cuban and Cora Opsahl, Dr Cristin Dickerson, John Quinn, Dr Suhas Gondi, Ge Bai, Andrew Tsang