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This is Haley Rudger 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
Sareya Sacochio, chief medical officer at Essence Health.
Sareya, thank you so much for joining me
today. Can you go ahead and tell us
a little bit more about yourself and your
background? Sure, Haley. And what a fantastic conference.
I just have to say the voices in
the room, the energy that we're feeling here
today is
fantastic.
So and I'm so impressed with the way
you said my name. Soria Sancosio. Very good.
I'm the chief medical officer for Essence Health,
and we are a Medicare Advantage health plan.
We've got about 60,000
members.
We focus on a physician led approach for
true value based care.
Awesome.
Well, to begin our conversation, I'd like to
start talking about balancing affordability and quality. So
how is your organization innovating to manage the
cost of care while maintaining or improving member
outcomes?
I like to describe the work that we
do as an action packed
documentary.
I'm gonna start with a documentary because it's
so important to be factual with what we
do and accurate
with how we document the clinical story of
the patient.
Where the action comes from is that PCP
engagement that we have. Quality of care is
critical in everything we do. Every visit, every
time, we focus on taking care of that
patient, not just for chronic disease, but for
preventive medicine,
chronic disease to optimize
the vitality of health for our members. So
it takes a whole team to do this.
And by telling the story,
we have an action packed documentary.
Well, that was an awesome way of explaining
that. Now moving on to my next question,
what are some of the best practices or
tools that your organization relies on to keep
quality of care at the forefront?
Well, first of all, Haley, we keep it
simple.
And I've got an acronym that I use,
a PPD.
So the clinicians who are listening will get
a PPD and what we're looking for there.
But for us, it is truly about
starting with primary care.
That access to a PCP cannot be overemphasized
how important that is. The relationship
between a patient and their primary care physician
is everything
because they know how to give good care,
But it takes a frequency of access to
primary care to ensure that you're covering both
preventive and chronic disease.
We partner with our physicians
and engage at a high level. In fact,
they help us develop our program
based on what they believe our patients, our
members need, and you can't do that without
data.
And instead of just saying we have data
analytics and just like everyone else, we do
have a tech stack, of course, but we
data enable
our PCPs to be very successful
and for our members to receive the best
care every time.
Our tech stack helps them not only see
the individual patient as they're in the exam
room, but their entire population. Because what often
is missed is the patient who doesn't cross
the threshold.
So we believe that outreach to every patient,
every member is critical to good health care.
Awesome. Now I wanna take a moment to
address health equity, which is a critical focus
for many health plans. 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? I sure can
in one word. Community.
And community means so many things to us
at Essence Health. Community means our team members,
And it takes every single one of us
to understand what is health equity and why
it matters because it does. Whether you're the
member in the room
or you are the PCP serving this patient,
we need to understand how to meet everyone
where they are
when they need it. So that's something that
we do. I'll also say that community engagement
is important.
So often we try to do our things
ourselves as a family physician.
I I'm a self starter, and I think
I can do everything myself. I can't. It
takes a team. It takes a community.
And why we're not only partnering
with community
nonprofits,
We partner with the community in our health
systems as they already have these relationships. We
can do so much more together
to have the greatest impact
if we focus on the big c. Absolutely.
Now for my final question today, I wanna
talk about the future of the payer space.
So 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? And how can leaders take a
step in this direction now?
Well, the latest
sexiest acronym
is I know you know this one. It's
AI. Okay. Okay. We talk about AI every
day, and it is so sexy, but we
need to demystify
Mhmm. AI.
It is everyone's job to understand AI. In
fact, we all do AI. If you've been
on Google lately, you have AI ed.
And so whether it's our members
that understand AI and how to use it
best, our team members, and our primary care
physicians. That is critical in the work that
we do. Demystify,
educate,
and let's train everybody up to be successful
in that. The last thing I'll share is
about technology.
For example, with our company, with Essence,
we are the first health plan that Oura,
Rings, have partnered with. So our Medicare Advantage
Plan offers to some of our members Oura
access,
And this gives us the opportunity
to
partner for the greatest health and vitality
that each member can have, whether it's measuring
their sleep, their heart rate, how active they
are. All of these things matter. And then
we partner with our physicians
to create the greatest impact with that medical
information now available.
Yeah. That's really amazing. I feel like I
haven't gone a single day without hearing about
the word AI. You know? Mhmm.
Mhmm. Well, thank you so much for joining
me today on the Becker's Payer podcast. Again,
this is Haley Recker.
We were recording live at the Becker's third
annual spring pair issues roundtable. Sariya, thank you
so much. Thank you, and have fun at
this fantastic conference. Thanks. You too.