Description: Anti-obesity medications have been met with reluctance from payers and employee benefits consultants who often lack analogs or empirical data to estimate the cost impact of new therapies coverage. Health plans considering coverage of anti-obesity medications will need to assess and manage the potential costs of covering these new therapies in context of their overall obesity management strategy, including coverage of nutrition counseling, weight management, and bariatric surgery.

Description: Every patient leaving the hospital has personal life-context circumstances that impact their chances of successful recovery and complications can be costly. Complex care management impacts over 50 percent of health care spend, with the admitted commercial population driving 37 percent of spend or $177M per 100,000 lives and the Medicare population driving 53 percent of spend or $600 million per 100,000 lives. The stakes are high, but existing care management solutions are mostly clinical and navigation call centers provide fragmented and outdated patient management systems, and do not address individual life-context. Discharged patients therefore remain underengaged and undercompliant, leading to costly complications. Innovative technology can help enable and integrate systems and existing infrastructure to leverage evidence-based contextualized care that will enhance care management, improve efficiency, and drive a better experience and outcomes for patients. This technology helps codifies life context, dynamically stratifying and engaging members digitally and telephonically helping virtual care teams to be more effective and efficient. In a recent randomized clinical trial, this technology and approach has shown a 50 percent reduction in the total cost of care, cutting the average and total cost of readmission, increasing virtual care team impact and member engagement and trust.

Description: CMS has required hospitals to publish their chargemaster rates, cash discounts and negotiated rates as of January 1, 2021. Our panel is comprised of a data strategist, an executive from a large hospital system and an actuary.