Leadership Driven by Passion

You do often talk about your passion for building a health care system that is, in your words, “worthy of our family and friends and is sustainably affordable.” How does your passion for this vision shine through in your actions every day? And how do you use this passion to inspire your team?

Well, it guides us. It guides all of our decisions across the board, whether it’s our strategy, our planning, how we hire and promote people, how we try to influence elected officials and appointed officials in the health care system, how we interact with physicians in hospitals. It is our guiding star. And what we’ve done most recently with that is we’ve actually quantified it. We said, “Yeah, we like the words, they mean something to us, they resonate with us.” But we’ve defined quantitatively what it means to be affordable, what it means to have clinical quality that’s worthy of our family and friends, what it means to have a member and patient experience that’s worthy of our family and friends.
And so we now have something to shoot for. And what we said is, you know what, we can’t get there by taking incremental steps, we can only get there by truly reimagining this health care system and dramatically and radically changing it to something that centers around the consumer and their experience, as opposed to making people navigate this labyrinth, this complexity that we know of as health care today.
So, what it’s pushed us to do is to say if we’re really serious about this mission, and we are, then we really need to be disruptive in the way that we engage, and be looking to transform the system, which is why we’ve developed this vision of what we call “health reimagined.” We’ve piloted some of these things. We’ve done things like figure out how to settle a claim in less than nine seconds.

Really?

Yeah, absolutely. Figured out how to allow people to have a 90-minute visit with their physician, to help go through what’s called a shared decision-making process, once they’ve had a diagnosis with that physician. A whole series of things that would dramatically change the nature of health care, bring it into the digital age, make it high tech, high touch, and really support the patient/physician interaction in a way that we think it was meant to be. So that’s how we try to live it every day. It’s not easy. This is a heavy lift. It’s difficult to do, but it’s worth it.