Relentless Health Value™

So, a few things to remind everybody. First of all, don’t forget EHRs (electronic health records) were purpose built originally for billing. This is no secret. People quite openly have called EHR systems glorified cash registers. If I want to be generous, maybe I would restate this to say that EHRs...

On Relentless Health Value, I don’t often get into our guests’ personal histories. There are a bunch of reasons for this, which, if you buy me beer, we can talk podcast philosophy and I will tell you all about my personal, very arguable opinion here. Nevertheless, in this healthcare podcast, we are...

If you go to the Sage Transparency dashboard Web site , you get a really graphical representation of the prices that any given hospital actually needs to charge so that they break even. You can see precisely which hospitals are operating on thin margins and which ones are not. You might be thinki...

For the past few shows and in a few coming up, we are circling our wagons around a theme: In healthcare in this country, there are two teams. One team is employers, taxpayers, patients … those trying to keep healthcare prices down. Then on the other team, we have those looking for healthcare prices...

HRRP stands for Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, by the way. I wanted to encore this episode with Dr. Rishi Wadhera because it’s a great representation of a common root cause reason why quality metrics sometimes don’t end well in real life. This root cause is otherwise known a...

This show was one of the most popular episodes in the past 12 months. So, here it is again for your listening pleasure. Mostly this whole episode is about the so-called “Big Three” PBMs that provide between the three of them pharmacy benefit services for 95% of insured Americans. PBM stands for pha...

We have done three inbetweenisodes so far on healthcare stakeholder collaboration. In sum, there are two major issues that patients have with our healthcare industry, and both can only be solved for if healthcare stakeholder collaboration happens: Patients falling into care gaps and winding up with...

In this healthcare podcast, I have Merrill Goozner on the show talking about his prognostications for the future of healthcare in this country and how, realistically, it could be engineered so that the healthcare industry rightsizes itself relative to our GDP. Merrill offers three glide paths to th...

Here’s a big thing that Betsy Seals makes clear in this show: Big companies can be successful in Medicare Advantage (MA)—and I mean success in all of its financial glory—because they have experience and the scale and also the specialized departments who keep track of all kinds of intricacies that a...

We got two new reviews this week on the podcast, which I was thrilled to see. The first was from, it turns out, Dave Chase from Health Rosetta, who wrote that “with so many people in healthcare practicing ‘innovation theater’ and bloviating versus driving real change, it’s a...

This episode was one of the most popular episodes in the past 12 months. Since it aired, there was a show with Kevin Schulman, MD ( EP366 ), that added some context, which I would recommend, and also one with David Muhlestein, PhD, JD ( EP364 ). Those two shows and this one are a good three-pack. A...

First of all, let me thank those of you who have left a podcast review in 2022. There was one from Best Healthcare Podcast Around on Apple Podcasts the other day that thanked Relentless Health Value for being singularly responsible for providing a 400-level education in so many complex areas of hea...

If you listened to the show with Dan O’Neill ( EP359 ), you would know this already. But let me tell you: If you’re a provider, even a provider very confident in your office’s ability to confer better patient health, you will still have a super hard time getting off the fee-for-service (FFS) hamste...

Here’s a Milton Friedman quote: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it [that entity] stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without d...

The show on direct contracting with Doug Hetherington ( EP367 ) and also the one with Katy Talento ( EP350 ), both of these experts have said that if an employer direct contracts with a provider organization, in general, the employer gets about 20% savings over the status quo. This makes sense&mdas...

This show was one of the most popular episodes in the past 12 months, so enjoy this encore while I am in Chicago moderating a panel on pharmacy benefit management at the WTW Conference Board. But while I have you, I just wanted to thank everyone for listening. You really are a part of our Relentles...

I saw a Tweet from Farzad Mostashari, MD , the other day; and I’m gonna rewrite it in the context of today’s show: This is why we can’t have nice things! As soon as someone comes up with something that might accomplish some good things when done in moderation and with good intent, it gets exploited...

I was at the PanAgora Pharma Customer Experience (CX) Summit earlier this summer. Let me tell you one of my big takeaways. Many at pharma companies who are trying to convince their organizations of the need to be provider- and/or patient-centric are having a tough go of it. Heard that coming from e...

It’s been said that healthcare in this country will not be transformed because of some incremental government policy, nor will this industry transform because of some tech company who techs the crap out of healthcare. It’s been said that the only way the healthcare industry in this co...

This show with AJ Loiacono is different than others you may have heard with him because in this healthcare podcast, we are not talking about PBMs (pharmacy benefit managers). We’re talking about brokers and EBCs (employee benefit consultants). So, say I’m a self-insured employer. Here...