Health system leaders get candid on affordability, the AI era, and more
Key Takeaways
- Affordability was positioned as a crisis requiring coordinated action among government payers, private sector stakeholders, pharma, devices, and insurers rather than isolated efforts by any single segment.
- Prevention was emphasized as a scalable cost-containment strategy, despite health systems’ historical optimization for downstream acute care revenue tied to high-ticket procedures.
Healthcare leaders unpack the industry's toughest challenges in a new video series.
Top healthcare leaders came together to talk health care costs, prevention, AI, and more during
The virtual roundtable brought together Robert Garrett, CEO of Hackensack Meridian Health; Kevin Beiner, chief operating officer at Northwell Health; Benjamin P. Levy, M.D., clinical director of medical oncology at Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center; and Deepak L. Bhatt, M.D., M.P.H., M.B.A., director of the Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital, in a discussion moderated by Stephanie Wierwille, EVP of strategy and innovation at BPD.
The series offers a candid look at how both health system leaders and providers are thinking about some of the biggest challenges, opportunities, and themes in the industry right now. One topic at top of mind for physicians, executives, payers and patients alike is the cost of care.
“We have a real responsibility to tackle it, to get the various stakeholders together and make healthcare more affordable, because it's reached a crisis point in a lot of ways,” Garrett said. “My mantra has been that it's not one sector's issue. We need to bring the private sector together with government, government payers, pharmaceutical companies, device makers and insurance companies. We need to step up and address the affordability crisis, and I think there are ways we can do that.”
A myriad of pressures contribute to the cost problem in health care, including policy changes, reimbursement pressures, friction with payers, and the costs of labor, Wierwille noted. Panelists agreed that prevention is an area where increased focus could help reduce health care costs across the board.
“Hospitals have historically focused on the sick patient coming into the emergency room, and many times we're optimized to provide care once a patient is in the system. The bigger challenge is reaching out to the community to keep people from getting sick, while acknowledging that a lot of health care revenue comes from people getting sick and needing high-ticket procedures,”
While innovation remains crucial to provide the best possible care to patients, a tandem focus on preventative care could substantially reduce costs, Bhatt explained.
Approaching prevention in a way that addressed social determinants of health is important, Garrett said, noting that studies have shown that roughly 80% of an individual’s health depends on social factors. Screening for social determinants of health is the first step, but interventions are what truly make a difference for patients facing social determinants of health, he added.
The panel also
“Innovation will be either an ingredient of the answer to the affordability challenge or a threat to our traditional business model,” Beiner said, explaining that as more patients use AI on their own as part of their healthcare journey and look to AI resources for answers, providers should be considering how to get ahead of this trend and possibly move into lower-cost settings. “If we don't do it, someone else will, and by someone else I don't mean the provider space,” he said.
Levy pointed to ambient documentation tools as a near-term win for easing administrative burden on clinicians, while cautioning that AI's role in clinical decision support needs to be rolled out carefully.
"It's a complex world, and my hope is that we can do this carefully and iteratively," Levy said.
The full roundtable is being released as a series on
Introductions and the one burning issue for our leaders A "perfect storm" of change, and AI's emergence The financial squeeze: Prevention, affordability, and care beyond the hospital
