What do Dr. Bechara Choucair, David Holmberg, Dr. Leana Wen, and Marjorie Morrison have in common? Over the last few years, they’ve joined our podcast to share prescient perspectives about the future of health care in America. And they’re all speaking at AHIP 2022 alongside other leaders from our industry.
Here are some highlights from their featured episodes on The Next Big Thing in Health. We hope you’ll join us in Las Vegas to hear more.
1. Social health is integral to overall health.
Dr. Bechara Choucair is the Chief Health Officer for Kaiser Permanente, and recently served as the White House coordinator on COVID-19 response. On the podcast, he spoke about how the health care industry can take a broader approach to overall health by integrating physical, mental, and social health and services.
“We have known for a very long time that housing and health are interconnected. We can't expect someone to live a healthy life if they don't have a stable roof over their head,” Choucair said. “We've learned that from research, we've learned that from studies year after year, and honestly we know that from common sense.”
“I do believe that we have, as a country, to start thinking about health more broadly… to be able to optimize the health of people we have to be thinking about their physical health, their mental health, and their social health.”
But what does that look like according to Choucair? A matrix that includes primary care doctors and specialists to take care of a person’s physical health, plus counselors, therapists, and psychiatrists to take care of mental health, as well as a network of social health providers to support housing, food security, transportation, social connection, financial need, and more.
Listen: COVID-19 Vaccines, a ‘Light at the End of the Tunnel’: White House Vaccinations Coordinator
2. Provide individual care, but do it for the masses.
Highmark Health CEO and AHIP Board Chair David Holmberg spoke about the impact of the omicron COVID-19 variant, what policies will impact our health care system in the upcoming year, the future of telehealth, and what’s happening in… hockey?
“We have to find like-minded organizations who believe in the mission, who want to improve quality, who want to improve outcomes, but they also want to do it through the filter of affordability. We're talking about household affordability — the ability for families to afford copays, to pay their insurance, and have access to care when they need it.” said Holmberg. “It's all about partnerships. There is no one who is big enough to go it alone. Our whole approach is to find partners who have expertise in delivering care in a local market, and work with them on these value concepts. We give them incentives to take a different approach and move away from fee-for-service and instead focus on the quality of life that their members and patients have.”
Holmberg says that while the wave of telemedicine adoption at the beginning of the pandemic has tapered off, he still thinks it’s a critical part of the future of care connecting clinicians to patients, but also clinicians to clinicians: “We have a highly developed stroke program and our doctors are engaged using telehealth in real time with clinicians in rural sites across West Virginia, Pennsylvania, even into Western New York, where they are engaging as patients present themselves in some of these rural hospitals around the country. That's a perfect example of how you can get specialist care right to the site of need very quickly.”
Listen: What to Expect in 2022: Highmark Health
3. Health care happens to all of us.
Dr. Leana Wen is an emergency physician and professor of health policy and management at George Washington UniversityShe sees clear opportunities to address public health challenges in both the near and longer terms.
The COVID-19 crisis has made existing health disparities more visible, she noted. “This virus is not the one that's doing the discriminating,” said Wen. “We have neighborhoods that are just a few miles apart where there is a 20-year gap in life expectancy… while we strive for long-term change — and we need to work on these issues of inequities and racism and so many other entrenched issues — but while we work on them there are also very specific things that we can do right now.”
“I hope that we will finally get to a conversation about health that is beyond health care. We know that 97% of cost is spent on health care but I think that what all of us know is that what determines how long you live, how well you live, how happy you are, what your life looks like is, is not just about what happens within the four walls of a hospital, or a clinic. It's about all of these other factors that go into good health as well: the water that we drink, the air that we breathe, the educational opportunities that we have access to. We know that poverty and inequality - these are things that are inextricably linked to health.”
Listen: Disaster Response, Women’s Health & COVID-19: Dr. Leana Wen
4. There's no one-size-fits-all care.
Marjorie Morrison, CEO and Co-Founder of Psych Hub, discussed changing perceptions around treating mental health, and some of the ways she manages her own wellbeing as a busy CEO.
“Everybody has mental health, so I think what’s so frustrating — especially for those that have been in this space for a long time — it's that we somehow turn mental health into mental illness,” she said. “We had a mental health crisis pre-COVID. A lot of things were contributing to it, and COVID just kicked it into overdrive… And now it's a little crazy, but it's also really cool to see people so openly share their mental health stories because everybody has them. It's this amazing moment in time when people feel comfortable saying ‘I suffer from depression,’ or ‘my mother is an alcoholic and suffers from substance use,’ or ‘my child has an eating disorder.’ We’re all human.”
“We all have good days, we all have bad days — we all have it. And those things are healthy. If you don't know what it feels like to have periods where you feel depressed, then you don't really know what good feels like. So much of our pivot is that mental health is a part of our life. We've seen the statistics that when someone has poor mental health and they're not doing well, how it affects their physical health - ER visits, substance use, and every specialty. I'm really hopeful that we're moving into a time now where people are starting to integrate it.”
Listen: Changing the Way We Perceive Mental Health: Psych Hub