A: The questions is“what is the emphasis on quality care?” In a-fee-for-service world, there is very little attention to quality. While in a value-focused world,the quality becomes an extremely important differentiation component in terms of how well physicians are doing. In the “old world,” the mentality is: I saw the patient. I delivered a service, so you need to pay me! In the“value world”- where you apply precision medicine – you pay based on the outcome, which must meet nine to ten agreed-upon quality metrics. So in essence, the focus needs to be on changing the payment paradigm toward a system where the physician gets paid for achieving improved quality metrics that the patient needs and deserves.

A: For a hospital system or large physician group to apply precision medicine, i.e.value medicine, a supportive infrastructure is required. Such an infrastructure is in the process of being built right now and will continue to be built over several more years.Why is this important? In a fee-for-service world, you were paid just to order something. In a value, world, you have to track it. Did you do it? Did you follow up? Did you implement change?

Let me explain this with a couple examples:

If one of the quality metrics is: “I pay you if your patient has received an influenza vaccine with a desired outcome to avoid the patient being hospitalized with pneumonia or the flu.”Therefore, if you immunize all your patients we should pay you more, because it is the right thing to do for all the patients.Right? Now think of a possible scenario where a patient comes into the doctor’s office and the doctor asks “Did you get the flu shot?” The patient’s response may be: “I don’t know.” A supportive infrastructure allows the payor to immediately send back information to the provider saying “Ms. Jones did in fact receive that influenza vaccine.”

Or another example: a physician writes a prescription for a diabetes medicine. But how does the doctor really know whether the patient actually took the medicine?Well, the information is available since the payor knows the exact time the patient picked up the prescription. The most cost effective way of knowing if a patient took their medication and followed up might be working with a health plan and their data systems. Value-based care requires significant investments but it’s better for those investments to be done centrally as with a health plan system with data being fed through all of the provider organizations.

So yes, you do need to have the technology, but it is technology built for and with the appropriate people in mind. That means, you need to align either with CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) or you need to align with each payor, because they are the ones who have the needed information.

In the end, if a provider does this infrastructure investment by themselves, it will be very expensive. If they partner with a payor, it will be much less.

A: Let’s look at the banking industry fifteen years ago. Everyone used to go into the bank to deposit a check. They signed the check, waited in line, deposited it, and that is how banking used to be. Now, this has changed with disruptive technologies. Most checks are received electronically, or if you receive a check,you take a picture with the smart phone app to deposit the check electronically.

Another great example is the airline industry and what happened there. In the “old days,” one called a travel agent to book a flight. Now, going online you can see every price for every airline –this is called transparency. One click further allows us to look at the quality of each airline, or find out baggage fees, etc.

Compare this to where we are right now in healthcare: we have no transparency. We have no ability for cost comparisons;we have no ability to look at and compare outcomes. The disruptive events that are going to occur in the healthcare sector will actually facilitate precision medicine by honing in and focusing on the outcomes, quality, and cost. But until we have such transparency, we can’t succeed.

A: If the provider is to be successful taking care of patients from a quality standpoint, the provider has to work with health plans. Health plans have the data, and there is no question that this collaboration is starting to occur and will increase.

A: Clinical integration is absolutely required! If you’ve got numerous providers in a system or a large group taking care of a patient, they have to be integrated: the specialist, the hospital, the whole health group, and the pharmacy. Until these people are aligned looking at endpoints, you are not going to be successful.

What we have found at Humana, with our focus on value delivered by providers,is that this clinical integration – when done correctly – results in are markable reduction in overall cost. It is in the range of a 20% cost reduction compared to a fee-for-service system. Importantly, as a prerequisite, you need to have this integrated clinical network in play.

A: I think that people need to be aware that precision medicine is something that already exists in so many things we do – look at breast cancer with the use of anti-estrogen treatment or tests that have been used now for 30 years. Precision medicine will continue to evolve in being instrumental in how we care for every individual, or most individuals, and it is really completely aligned with value medicine. So people sometimes think that precision medicine is different from outcomes-based medicine. And I would say if you believe in outcomes medicine you have to use precision medicine, or it can’t possibly work.

In other words, precision medicine is a tool in the toolbox for value medicine.