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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.
Today, I am joined by Harlan Pickett, president
of EqualCare Health Solutions.
Harlan, thank you so much for joining me
today. Can you go ahead and tell us
a little bit about yourself and your background?
Absolutely. It's my pleasure to be here. Great
event. I've really enjoyed it.
I have been in the insurance and
health care world for about eighteen years. Started
Eagle Care back in 2019.
We provide
alternative solutions
for employers
to help control their health care spend and
to provide better access to health care.
These are customized plans, nothing off the shelf.
It actually gives the employer control over what
their health plan looks like instead of once
in, you know, a one size fits all.
That that's that's not
effective in today's
environment. It doesn't allow you to control cost
in any way, shape, or form, and it
certainly doesn't provide
the access to health care that your employees
deserve.
Well, I'd like to start this conversation off
by asking you what you and your team
at Eagle Care Health Solutions
does to
ensure that the quality of care is kept
at the forefront.
Now that that is it's paramount.
First of all, if you don't know cost
and you don't know quality,
there's no way you can understand what value
is. There's a lot of talk about value
based care right now.
But in this health care system,
it's almost impossible to know what the cost
is first. Well, if you don't know the
cost and you don't know the quality, how
do you know it's valuable? How do you
put a value to it? So we work
diligently on that side of it. One of
the major ways we do it is we
do direct contracts with
physicians
that have shown
outstanding
outcomes and that actually care about their clients,
so much so that it is a membership
based model
that is a monthly
per member per month,
and then any additional cost that would be
incurred at
that facility
is zero.
So it's just a monthly membership. There's no
co pays. There's no out of pocket,
and, therefore, any cost that happened there
never are attributed to the plan. The plan
doesn't have to pay anything. The employer doesn't
have to pay anything. It's just that one
monthly fee. This aligns
the incentives
for the
patient
and the physician
and it rebuilds that relationship as well.
Therefore, the patient and the physician working together
with one goal and that is an improved
quality of life and improved health for the
patient.
That's where you get the quality.
Absolutely. You know, I'd like to keep that
conversation going about quality.
So improving quality and advancing health equity while
also reducing cost seems to be a big
priority for everyone in health care. So how
do you approach aligning these priorities in your
organization's strategic vision? Yeah. Imagine that the reason
that you can't see a doctor is because
I don't know how much it cost.
We removed that barrier.
So health equity in many cases is because
folks cannot
afford to go or they don't even know
if they can afford to go, and there
maybe isn't a location
close to them.
So doing these direct direct contracts, having a
direct contract with a physician
that's gonna give this individual
not five to seven minutes, which is the
national average, but is gonna provide them forty
five minutes to an hour to focus just
on them, have a conversation,
not just about their health but about their
lifestyle choices,
It changes their life for a positive way.
It brings them back into
a relationship with a physician that they heard
tell about, but it hasn't been available for
so many years. It levels the playing field.
This is a level of service that in
most folks say, oh, you're talking about an
executive concierge. No. No. We're not talking about
an executive concierge. We're talking about
a physician
who is really invested
in your health
and invested so much so they wanna have
a relationship.
Most of our members
don't just have an app that they work
through to talk to their physician. They actually
have their physician's phone number.
They can text their physician. They can call
their physician if something's going on. We've had
the physician come and meet people on New
Year's Eve
whenever the baby
was turning blue. What do I do? This
would normally be an ER visit.
It turned out it it although it sounds
really serious, it turns out it was a
very simple thing
that the doctor was able to take care
of.
Those folks felt so much better.
Obviously, the baby felt so much better,
but
they've never stopped talking about how important it
was to them to have that relationship and
have that opportunity to do that. Well, can
you imagine what it was like when they
went back to work
to talk about their experience?
All of a sudden,
in that particular employer group, we started seeing
even greater participation,
even greater engagement than there was before. Sometimes
all it takes is one
isolated incident
to make something just explode, and all of
a sudden the uptake on it is incredible.
Absolutely. That's amazing. And I'd like to keep
the conversation going with HealthEquity,
as you mentioned earlier.
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? Yeah. There's
there's obviously certain communities.
And I won't just get into inner city.
I mean, that's that's pretty well known, but
we're talking about rural destinations right now. There's
been a lot of talk at this conference
about how do we affect change in rural
areas to provide them access to. We're actually
it it it's a pretty pretty new thing.
It it became an opportunity for us. We're
investing
in a couple of physicians' offices that are
in rural areas
to help them change away from a fee
for service to this membership
based model
because that then
that generates your income today. What many rural
positions
cannot do
is wait through the payment cycle.
That payment cycle eats them up.
Even if they are
seeing a decent number,
if you're spread across multiple health plans and
you're continually waiting for that money to come
in,
they're already understaffed a lot of times, especially
in rural areas.
All of a sudden, now they can't afford
to even keep the people on. It's hard
for them to keep their practice going.
A change in model then
is
an acceptable way to keep your practice going
to help grow that practice because that that's
what our our mission is going to be,
is to bring then local employers
even in those rural areas to show them,
hey. Here's a here's a model that will
work better, and now your folks can have
this relationship again. The other thing we're doing
is providing them technology so that they can
do televisits.
Many of them don't have that type of
infrastructure in their practice, but we're bringing that
technology to them so that they can provide
that too. That helps expand their practice within
their state.
Amazing. Well, this has been such a fascinating
conversation. Again, this is Haley Rucker with the
Becker's Payer Podcast
recorded live at the Becker's third annual spring
payer issues roundtable. Harlan, thank you so much
for joining me today. It's been my honor
and my pleasure. Thank you so much,