Hinge Health’s Post

Transcript

So I will just ask you to introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about your organization. Alright, well, I am Ellen Kelsey, I'm the president and CEO of Business Group on health. Business Group on Health is a nonprofit association working primarily with employers, self funded employers on some of the most challenging health and well-being issues that they're grappling with on behalf of the workforce. You know, it wasn't that long ago that almost all services were carved in through a health plan. You know, you could go back maybe a decade and most employers had a health plan partner and maybe they had a stand alone PBM. Maybe a standalone EAP, but everything else is pretty much done through the health plan. And then slowly but surely we saw 1 by 1 certain things carved out for various clinical programs or mental health and behavioral health supports to the point where pre pandemic we had already beginning to hear about point solution fatigue from employers of really, OK, this is getting too complicated. And we did this for good reason because each of these capabilities and solutions were very focused on. A certain condition or a certain clinical area that maybe wasn't being fully and adequately addressed by the health plan. But now that we've done this, have we created maybe in a way a little monster here of gosh, it's, it's too many. It's hard for us to manage as employers, let alone for our employees and members to navigate and effectively engage in. That was pre pandemic. And then we had the pandemic where, you know, I always say, we, we all know what happened, right? We, we had to go virtual. People couldn't go in, in office to see their physicians. We had burgeoning mental health needs. We had chronic conditions that were getting worse. So more point solutions and vendors were added to that already crowded ecosystem. And so the pendulum swung very far to the other end of the extreme of everything once being carved into virtually almost everything being carved out and this really rallying cry from employers for the need for integration, simplification and rationalization within that ecosystem. So points or the pendulum, maybe not. Bringing all the way back to carved in, but some are probably in between where it is today to where it had been. What do you think is the biggest? Barrier. To people actually making the changes that they say that they want to make, you know, we come to these conferences, we get involved in these great conversations and all these big ideas, and then we go home. They're hard problems, their longstanding, deeply rooted and trenched issues, so they're not easy to solve and there's no quick fix. That doesn't mean that they're insurmountable. I think it means being really focused on the real issues and having that true desire to move beyond where we are today and then to hopefully a brighter, better future. I think that employers have a lot of agency. They are the largest purchaser of healthcare in the United States. They have an unbelievably challenging role, you know, navigating this industry. This is not their core business, right they. Do a lot of other things that are great in in the world, but they are not, you know, delivery providers of healthcare services themselves. They're payers of those services, but as the largest payer, they do have agency and they need to hold their vendors and partners accountable to deliver. Back to the earlier comment about, you know, some of the vendor frustrations and they have a voice that they need to use.