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This is Gracelyn Keller with the Becker's Healthcare
podcast, and we are recording live at the
2024
fall payer issues roundtable.
I'm joined by Adrienne Moore, who is the
senior vice president of finance at Banner Health.
Adrienne, thanks for being here. We'd love to
start our conversation off by having you introduce
yourself a little bit further.
Yes. Banner Health is an integrated delivery network
based in Arizona.
We have about 14,000,000,000
in annual revenue, more than 30 hospitals, and
ambulatory care sites, that make up over 500
locations.
Wonderful. Well, thanks for joining me. And let's
start our conversation today talking about growth goals.
So from improving member experience and expanding value
based care to controlling costs, payer executives have
ambitious growth goals for the rest of 2024
and looking into the new year ahead. In
your role, what is your top priority and
how are you planning to get there?
I think our top priority is growth in
value plans right now.
Value is really what's going to change
the way that we practice health care,
and we'll continue to focus on that.
Other health plans out there, we've seen in
the media,
things like
margin over members, and I don't know that
growth is the the right word for what's
happening right now. It's,
more of a sustainability
that we're seeking rather than growth at this
moment.
That margins over members comment came from another
payer. That is not Banner's mission, I do
wanna clarify.
We are are really out to serve our
members and focus on value.
Wonderful. And going off of that, at an
industry level, how would you describe the biggest
barriers to effectively serving and engaging members? And
what opportunities do you see for large scale
improvements? And then how are you applying all
of that into your current strategies?
So the big barriers for Banner, they're the
same for everyone in the industry. We've got
an older, sicker population.
We've got deferred care from the pandemic.
We see
digestive cancers on the rise. We've seen a
lot of things that really have high cost,
and then our innovations are expensive right now
too. So we're seeing increasing drug costs.
GLP ones are the big story of the
day, but
forget about obesity for a moment. They're costing
a lot in treatment of diabetes too, and
they're driving up, member costs. So
inflation and cost pressures
are really the the top headwinds, and this
population is going to continue to get larger
as we move into 2030 when the rest
of the boomers
finally hit retirement age.
And shifting gears just slightly toward leadership,
keeping pace in today's dynamic health care landscape
is challenging. So I'd love to know a
piece of advice you'd share with other peer
leaders to grow their businesses while keeping members
top of mind.
I'd say we all need to continue to
focus on value, but we also need to
just do the right things.
We've got the cost and quality components of
the equation. We need to be working on
both of them. Cost is really hard right
now, but anything we can do to improve
quality, improve outcomes, improve members' lives, we should
just continue to focus on that. I do
believe that financial performance follows doing the right
thing.
Wonderful. And as we wrap our conversation
here today, are there any closing remarks you'd
like to share on the podcast?
So as long as I've been in healthcare,
Medicare insolvency
has been looming on the horizon.
There have always been expensive new technologies
that change the game, and we adapt,
think about how much imaging has changed over
the last 25 years. Robotic surgery,
things like CAR T,
There's always a new expensive
innovation on the horizon. But I think we're
at this turning point now where we've got
innovations like AI
and cost pressures.
And all of these things are gonna come
together, and we're at an inflection point where
we can find the right mix to make
a sustainable future for health care. And I
would challenge all of the leaders out there
to be thinking of how we use this.
It's not a crisis. We're not leveraging a
good crisis here, but we're leveraging a confluence
of events that are putting pressure on us,
but arming us with tools at the same
time to come out of this with a
better health care model.
Wonderful. Well, Adrienne, thanks so much for taking
the time to be here today and join
me on the Becker's healthcare podcast. Again, we
are live at the 2024
fall payer issues round table.
My pleasure. Thanks, Grace.