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This is Haley Recker with the Becker's Payer
Podcast, and we are recording live at the
Becker's third annual spring payer issues roundtable.
I am thrilled today to be joined by
doctor Rebecca Huie, medical director of Highmark Full
Care.
Doctor, thank you so much for joining us
today. Thank you for having me.
Alright. So before we get started, can I
just have you go ahead and introduce yourself
and share a little bit about your background?
Sure. I am doctor Rebecca Huey. I'm a
medical director with Highmark Whole Care. I've been
there for about five years.
I am an integrative family medicine physician by
background
and then have also worked, with multiple,
types of patients, including civilians
and military
inpatient and outpatient.
Oh, that's fascinating.
I'd like to start our conversation a little
bit off by talking about balancing affordability and
quality of care. So how is your organization
innovating to manage the cost of care while
maintaining or improving member outcomes?
So,
well, for me and and I always say
this. For leaders, the critical first step is
to see the health care journey
through the patient's eyes. So at Highmark Health,
we have a model called living health, and
Living Health is our strategy to redesign and
enhance the health care experience
by integrating insurance
and health care delivery. So we leverage the
technology we have
and
data analytics, and then we take that information
that we gain about member behavior to create
a system that is more proactive, is more
personalized,
and is more coordinated.
And so we're accomplishing this by basically removing
redundancies and making things more streamlined whenever we
can.
Living health aims to make interactions between members
and their care teams more productive, and that
makes things more timely.
It makes care
better and excuse me. Let me go back.
Yeah. So Living Health aims to make interactions
between members and their care teams more productive,
providing a timely and actionable information to improve
health outcomes and then ultimately make care more
affordable.
I'd like to pivot the conversation a little
bit more towards health equity now.
So can you share an overview of a
key initiative here that you're involved in or
particularly
excited about, and what are you hoping to
achieve?
Absolutely.
So health equity is fundamental to our mission
as an organization
at Highmark Healthcare. So we have several impactful
initiatives.
We're fighting food insecurity through community farmers markets.
We're distributing tens of thousands of pounds of
fresh produce annually. And there are a couple
of programs also that I want to highlight.
We're deeply invested in maternal health
through a couple of programs. One is called
mom matters,
and we have this is a special program
for pregnant women.
And we give education and support to moms
to help them navigate a healthy pregnancy.
We help them find a doctor, set up
their appointments.
They can call as soon as they find
out they're pregnant, and we can set them
up. And then we answer questions,
and we can direct them to community services.
And we arrange home visits by nurses.
We can provide transportation to appointments, and we
can even help them stop smoking, which is
very important for,
for great outcomes for their babies.
We also have what's called the pathway program.
And pathway is a comprehensive program, and this
supports pregnant women and new mothers managing substance
use disorder.
So it integrates
medical care, like medically assistant treatment for withdrawal,
but then also mental health counseling and social
services.
Again, transportation,
education.
We even help treat babies who are suffering
from neonatal abstinence syndrome
and any other postpartum care that the mom
or baby might need.
In addition, we support breast milk
banks and diaper banks and provide doulas.
So when very notably, just one last thing,
we've
scaled up
our training significantly so that we can help
members
reenroll
every year in Medicaid,
so that they keep their benefits and they're
not dropping benefits or losing their health care.
And so we're doing this by partnering with
pharmacies,
title one schools,
and also just through community events, letting people
know if
they have Medicaid that they do need to
continue to renew that in order to maintain
their services.
Well, that's so refreshing to hear, especially as
a woman. I feel like a lot of
women centered sources,
turn a blind eye to women's health care.
Definitely.
So so that kind of brings me to
my next question, which is about member satisfaction.
What experience or engagement strategies have proven effective
for your organization? How are you measuring success?
So overall, I will say, first of all,
that our our members tend to be very
satisfied.
We view member satisfaction
holistically.
So this is all encompassing experiences with the
health care plan and then also with providers.
So and we consistently score well on the
annual CAHPS surveys, which is consumer assessment of
health care providers and systems.
So we believe in continuous feedback and continuous
improvement,
and we're monitoring appeals and grievances.
We also conduct
immediate post call surveys in customer service so
we can know right away
if they had a good experience or a
bad experience, and then what about it was
good or bad.
And we're currently achieving a 4.9
out of five
satisfaction score. So that's excellent.
And we use these post appointment surveys for
provider feedback,
and we actively, again, strive to improve our
process.
And this is really, really important. We prioritize
this feedback because we found that a positive
member experience strongly correlates, of course, with better
health outcomes because they're more willing to engage
with us on a regular basis
when they know that they're gonna have a
pleasant, productive, and rewarding experience.
Absolutely. And just to wrap up our conversation
today, what do you see as the biggest
opportunity for payers to lead the charge in
transforming care delivery and driving better outcomes for
all stakeholders?
Well, so this is gonna resonate with a
lot of people, but everything seems so complicated
right now. Things are changing daily, and then
we're inundated with constant messaging from a ton
of different places.
Sometimes it's hard to tell signal from noise
just because of all the information we have,
and it's often conflicting.
Keeping that in mind, I believe the biggest
opportunity for us as a plan lies in
simplifying the health care experience for everyone.
So payers can lead by making benefits crystal
clear and easy to navigate,
and technology has been our friend in this
endeavor. So technology is a major lever here.
We can expand access through telehealth,
online programs, and then also using tools like
a like AI to stream
the processes.
I'm gonna mention again,
coming back to our living health model, which
is built on this principle of integration
and simplification.
So, again, for leaders, the critical first step
is to truly see the health care journey
through the patient's eyes and then understanding their
challenges and their needs. And this is essential
to building a simpler, more effective, and patient
centered system.
Well, doctor Huie, thank you so much for
joining me today. That was an amazing conversation.
Again, we are live at the Becker's third
annual spring payer issues roundtable.