The politics of healthcare is a mess in this country, as you know.
But Matthew Hanis, executive producer and host of the Business of Healthcare, is more interested in practical measures for incrementally improving a system that is the most expensive in the world and doesn’t offer a great quality of care in exchange.
We also talk about the M&A landscape in healthcare, including the trend towards increasing vertical integration, as well as…
- How to balance profits with patient care
- The key difference between a single payer system and universal healthcare
- The 3 biggest upcoming regulatory reforms to keep an eye on
- The largest contributor of waste in healthcare
- And more
Listen now…
Mentioned in This Episode: www.bohseries.com
Episode Transcript:
Patrick Stroth: Hello there, I’m Patrick Stroth. Welcome to M&A Masters, where I speak with the leading experts in mergers and acquisition. We’re all about one thing here, that’s a clean exit for owners, founders, and their investors. Healthcare is literally a force of nature in our economy. It’s been in the news quite a bit lately and like it or not, as time goes on, everyone will be consuming more, not less of it.
Today we’ll discuss the future of healthcare from a business perspective, and how mergers and acquisitions will factor into the inevitable changes coming to healthcare. I’m pleased to be joined by Matthew Hanis, Executive Producer and host of Business of Healthcare. Now in his 13th season, BOH is an online platform where Matt interviews senior leaders in healthcare. BOH estimates that 118,000 decision-makers are responsible of 80% or more of the buy and sell sides of US healthcare. Just about 20,000 of these very decision-makers participate in BOH’s audience. That’s about one in six, which is a respectable share of any market. It is for this audience that BOH was purpose-built to identify and help propagate proven innovations, elevating mission and margin more rapidly. Wow, one in six, that’s nothing to sneeze at. Matt, thanks for joining me, and welcome to the program.
Matthew Hanis: Patrick, thank you so much for inviting me on.
Patrick Stroth: Now, we’ll get into Business of Health in a moment. First, tell us how’d you get to this point in your career?
Matthew Hanis: Well, I tried to make as many mistakes as possible, and this is the culmination. I’d spent about 25 years in healthcare, most of that time I’ve either worked on the vendor side, selling data solutions to health systems, larger payers of health plans, or working within a health system, Mercy in St. Louis, to have the experience of actually doing the work of healthcare. Ultimately, all of those experiences culminated in a passion for entrepreneurship and for finding the innovations that I felt could really transform our healthcare delivery system in the United States.
Patrick Stroth: When we see BOH’s core statement, which is mission and margin, with mission, we get that because healthcare and doing good and providing care to people, there’s a passion, the mission. It’s the margin that people start looking at real quick. Why don’t you explain what you mean by mission and margin in the Business of Healthcare.
Matthew Hanis: Healthcare makes up about a fifth of the US economy, and every sector of the economy is important, but healthcare one of our challenges though is the cost of healthcare has continued to rise at a rate faster than pretty much any other aspect of our economy. But when you look at the quality of healthcare as measured by access, patient satisfaction, survival, life expectancy, all the broad measures of healthcare, we don’t do very well in this country. We have a major portion of our economy, which is getting progressively more expensive, and on most measures of quality, it’s not very good.
I believe that this is unsustainable. Now, the laws of physics tell us that all systems come back into balance. There’s a couple of different ways that we can see the US healthcare system coming back into a healthy balance in terms of cost and quality. One of the ways though, which tends to be the primary focus right now is trying to cut payments to physicians, and try to manage healthcare by managing how consumers consume it and managing how it’s provided. Our belief is that these approaches are unsustainable and that there are at the same time, very, very sustainable ways to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our healthcare system. That’s what we try to bring to bear.
Mission is really about all the things you and I can agree on, quality, access, patient satisfaction, physician and other provider satisfaction. Margin is recognizing that like any other part of the economy, the providers who deliver healthcare must be able to make a profit in order to make it a sustainable business. We just need to figure out how to balance that with the cost to the consumer.
Patrick Stroth: The problem that you mention out there which is making a challenge for us is that cost of healthcare continues to go up, quality continues to go down. I would think that a lot of people would think well, the more it’s intuitive almost that if you spend more you should get better quality. Are there any specific reasons why the cost goes up and yet we’re not getting the value, the benefit?
Matthew Hanis: Yes. There’s a couple of different reasons. One issue which is very microeconomics, is pricing. We know that one of the biggest drivers of the cost of healthcare is the price that’s charged for healthcare. There’s an enormous set of problems around understanding price. God forbid you should have to go to the hospital for surgery. It’s extremely difficult to understand what that’s going to cost you, and what the costs would be for you to go get that exact same procedure in other settings.
Why is it so complicated to understand price and the cost of healthcare? Well, I believe that a big part of that is we’ve got a lot of intermediaries in our delivery system. Too many intermediaries can cause such a separation between the consumer of healthcare, the provider of healthcare and the payer of healthcare, that we create a whole myriad of complexity. I think a big aspect that we can look at is, why do we have so many intermediaries, so many people that handle healthcare transactions multiple times? Why is it so hard to get that data to be meaningful to the consumer?
I think another cause that we face in our system is regulatory constraints. I’m not suggesting that healthcare should become an unregulated industry. I think we can all agree that just about any industry in the US, we want to have good regulation over healthcare to protect the consumer and protect the providers of healthcare. The problem that we face today though is that the regulatory environment that healthcare providers face is so confusing and so complex that it’s almost impossible to comply. I’ll give you a concrete example. A typical health system reports somewhere in the order of 4,000 different quality metrics each year. Most of those quality metrics, most of those 4,000 are actually redundant metrics that are being reported to different organizations in slightly different ways.
Another issue in the regulatory side are the constraints of the Stark Laws. The Stark Laws were created to prevent or to discourage physicians from referring patients to treatment from which the physician would profit. The problem with that is if we ask a physician to take accountability for a patient’s total spend, and for that patient’s quality of care and their overall quality of life, which is the concept of fee-for-value, if we were to ask physicians to do that, unlock their ability to make those decisions and to be able to refer patients to the providers that they most want to work with and potentially refer them to themselves, for things like imaging, and other services that are adjacent or ancillary to the primary purpose of care, these issues of so many intermediaries and the regulatory constraints that are so confusing, create an enormous part of the enormous waste of our delivery system. Today we spend about a third of our healthcare dollar on waste, things that do not provide value. A decent chunk of that waste is directly related to too many intermediaries and enormous regulatory constraints.
Patrick Stroth: Wow. I think when people look at healthcare, the only way you address this is, either you have the universal care, care for all, unlimited, which a lot of people would say, well that means care for nobody because the system would be overrun. Or, the other extreme is fear there would be extreme rationing out there, where some arbitrary person will dole out allocation healthcare by some abstract basis. You’ve got fear on both sides, but it’s really a false choice. It’s not all of one, all this or nothing. There are models that are being set up and there are ways that are being tried to go forward. Why don’t you talk about those types of models.
Matthew Hanis: One of the fundamental trends in healthcare is the shift from fee-for-service to fee-for-value. The basic idea is that today, when a physician bills for a service they provide, or a hospital bills for a surgery that was performed in one of their operating rooms, they essentially are billing for units of work performed. They’re not charging for a knee replacement, they’re charging for all of the components that go into a knee replacement. The concept of fee-for-value is that you charge, or pay provider for the outcome that they’re delivering. The knee was replaced, no infection occurred, the patient came out of the procedure with a responsible period of recovery. Those concepts around fee-for-value create far better aligned incentives between the providers of healthcare and the payers of healthcare.
I just want to touch on your point about, I think you touched on the Medicare for all concept. It’s important to recognize three things about our current US delivery system. First, we cost per capita somewhere between 30% more and 200% more than the rest of the delivery systems in the world, like that in Britain, Canada, Sweden or Switzerland. Before we toss those systems out as being un-American, or undesirable, consider the fact that they generally provide much better access to care. More people can get to care faster. They cost on a per capita basis, far less than our system does, and in general their consumers of healthcare report being better satisfied with the care that they received.
Now, I’m not arguing that those systems are perfect, and I’m certainly not arguing the idea that Medicare for all is a particularly good solution. But I would want to differentiate between the concept of a single payer system versus the concept of universal healthcare. A single payer system essential says, we’re all going to agree that one entity is going to pay for healthcare. Doesn’t say what the rules are about that. It’s just saying that each of us that pays money into healthcare is going to pay it to one place, and that entity is going to be the entity that pays the providers of healthcare. That’s how most of the delivery systems in the industrialized world operate.
In the United States we kind of have that, because 70% of healthcare provided in the United States is paid for by the government. Most people forget that it’s a relatively small portion of healthcare that’s paid for by the consumer and large employers. A single payer system does not necessarily mean universal healthcare. Universal healthcare takes it a step further and says, everybody gets healthcare and the government’s going to pay for it. Two really different ideas, but related.
Patrick Stroth: Well, let’s focus on M&A on the physician side of the industry, because we’ve got the large health systems, and we’ve got the large institutions and then you’ve got the pharmacy development, medical devices and everything like that. Let’s just look at the physician provider side of the industry. What do you see for the future of physicians in healthcare as we try to change into this fee-for-value emphasis?
Matthew Hanis: I think physician practices for the next 5 to 10 years are in a race for lives. What I mean by that is, if you take the concept of fee-for-value, which has generally pretty solid evidence to indicate that it produces better healthcare value for the consumer and the payer and the provider. If you agree with that premise, then that means that physicians are in a race to find ways to be in contractual arrangements where they have accountability. If I’m a primary care practice, it behooves me to try to enter into contracts where I take on the risk of a Medicaid population, a Medicare population, but I go directly to employers and contract with those employers to serve their employees and the employees families.
Those sorts of arrangements, manage care contracting if you will, are the strongest position for a physician to be in to get a market. If I as a physician practice hold contracts, either for the bundles of healthcare, like I’m a surgical practice, and the bundle for doing orthopedic surgery for a large employer, or I’m in the primary care space and I’m going to contract for the quality of care for an entire population, I’m guaranteed to be sitting at the bird’s eye view of how the money moves in healthcare. If I don’t have the contract for lives, that means that I’m going be subcontracted to somebody else.
I believe the essence of the M&A space for the physician world will be the race for lives. Those physician practices that have built the infrastructure and the capacity to take on population risk of various sorts, that can demonstrate their value in measurable ways, those organizations will continue to expand contractual relationships and exclusive network relationships with payers and ensure the flow of patients to their doors. That requires an enormous amount of work in infrastructure. Frankly, many physician practices are not spending those dollars. I think from an M&A perspective, I don’t think we’re going to see much more acquisition of physician practices by health systems. We’ve seen that market cool significantly. In fact, there’s signs of a number of physician practices unwinding their relationships with health systems.
What I do think we’ll see is acquisition and merger between physician practices, specialty groups merging into multi-specialty. I would expect that when you look at the 4,000 largest physician practices in the country, those organizations will likely consolidate. In 10 years from now I would predict that we’ll have half of those practices that occupy the largest group of physicians.
Patrick Stroth: You spoke awhile earlier about where we’ve got a big layer of intermediaries involved between provider and patient. If there was a way that if we had the physician practices moving toward this fee-for-value model than physician groups are going to be consolidating and one group will buy another, and so forth. Does that translate also to possibly them buying other facilities, imaging centers, surgery centers, physical therapy? Is there room for vertical integration and how would that look?
Matthew Hanis: Yeah. I think you’re spot-on. I feel like the trend there is a combination for the race for lives. If I’m a physician practice, I can provide a much better Population Health solution if I’ve got pretty good control over lab, pharmacy, imagining, rehab, physical therapy, those sets of services that are ancillary to the work of a physician, but are critical to achieving a particular outcome for a patient. That vertical integration trend, I think is very likely. I think that trend comes in two different flavors. One flavor is the vertical integration of healthcare service, like I just described. But the other is vertical integration in a manner to dis-intermediate many of the non-value producing participants in the healthcare ecosystem.
I’ll give you an example. If a physician practice had the ability to manage the total, all the healthcare transactions for one of their patients and they’re in a Population Health contractual arrangement, they probably are going have a much better understanding of the spend of that patient and be able to manage that spend more effectively. I can imagine, or I can see physician practices getting better at being able to do the data of Population Health and perhaps dis-intermediating stakeholders by directly contracting with employers, or contracting with employers in a manner that takes advantage of less brand name sorts of health plans, and more health plans that are designed to serve physician practice needs as much as they’re designed to serve large employer needs.
Patrick Stroth: Is there going to be need for some regulatory reform in order to do this?
Matthew Hanis: I think there is. We’ve already seen the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services signaling that they want to soften or weaken the Stark regulations that prevent self-referral. We’re seeing several rulings that have come out of the Federal Trade Commission that solidify the ability for independent physician to contract together with health plans and other payers, without getting into anti-trust problems. I feel like from a regulatory perspective the three big things to be watch are Stark Laws, anti-trust law, and then a third area which is CON, certificate of need. Certificate of need constrains in about 20 states of the 50 states in the Union, about 20 states use CON laws to constrain the ability to create new imaging centers or add new surgery suites. Those constraints on the surface, make enormous amount of sense because they prevent the addition of unnecessary healthcare services, which often lead to an increase in utilization.
The problem with CON laws is they often get in the way of a physician practice being able to add imaging and other services to their capabilities of achieving that vertical integration. From an M&A perspective, the loosening of those laws would suggest an acceleration in the merger of physician practices and the expansion of practices to this vertical integration process.
Patrick Stroth: Could you see owners of medical facilities, I don’t know if they’re exclusively physicians as opposed to medical groups and physician practices by law, have to be owned by and run by a physician. But when you’ve got things like kidney dialysis centers, or labs, those don’t have to be owned by physicians. Could there be a situation in M&A where you could see a multi-state network of labs buying physician groups? Could that happen?
Matthew Hanis: I don’t know that I’m aware of that particular example occurring, but I’m 100% sure that there’s strange bedfellows in the outcome of these acquisitions. For example, United Healthcare acquiring DaVita, the largest dialysis business. Well, turns out United Healthcare is currently the largest employer of physicians in the United States. That’s kind of a surprising number because we all think of them as a health insurer, but in fact, they’re a provider of healthcare.
We also see retail pharmacy businesses moving aggressively into the providing of healthcare services. Being able to walk into a clinic at a Walgreens, to get your care taken care of. In those cases it’s not actually in most cases the entity, like the pharmacy is not necessarily employing the physician, but they’re contractually enabling the physician to practice care, and there’s movement of money. I would argue that, if it isn’t a merger on in fact, in many cases, it’s a merger in reality.
Patrick Stroth: The great interviews you have and they’re in HD quality videos and so forth, on Business of Healthcare. Matt, how can our listeners find you?
Matthew Hanis: Absolutely. They can find us on our website at BOHseries.com, or they can search for us on the web. Search on Business of Healthcare and our red logo, you’ll see us pop-up pretty high on the list, both our website, our podcast channels, or LinkedIn and our Twitter as well.
Patrick Stroth: Matt, thank you again for joining us, and we’ll talk again soon.
Matthew Hanis: Thanks so much Patrick. Thank you for having me.