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One silver lining of these COVID-19 times? The willingness to be inventive, try new approaches and invest resources in improving care outcomes. In this episode, Samantha Olds Frey, CEO of the Illinois Association of Medicaid Health Plans, describes what happened when health plans came together with Illinois Medicaid to support members facing unprecedented challenges arising from the pandemic.

Nationwide, emergency departments struggle with super utilizers, those patients who come into the ED as often as once a day. How can hospitals reduce utilization to bring down costs and still improve outcomes? Jason Greenspan, MD, associate chief medical officer with Emergent Medical Associates describes a breakthrough approach to care management.  

What problems can be solved when health plans collaborate with each other rather than compete? In this episode, we explore Project Link, a new forum that brings health plans together to understand the impact of social determinants of health (SDOH) on their members. In this episode, Michelle Jester, Executive Director of Social Determinants of Health for America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), describes innovative approaches to solving SDOH challenges achieved through health plan communication and collaboration.  

Telemedicine has been around for a long time, but many health care organizations made the first moves into telehealth with the COVID-19 public health emergency. Even before the pandemic, Washington DC-based Unity Health Care devised a telemedicine strategy that targeted underserved populations. How has the pandemic impacted Unity's program and will its current initiative become the new norm? Drs. Angela Diop and Andrew Robie discuss the present and future of Unity's telemedicine services and detail strategies your organization can use to bolster its telehealth efforts.  

As health care organizations face unprecedented challenges brought on by the pandemic, how can they plan for a post-COVID-19 world? In this episode, Matt Eyles, President and CEO of America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), discusses new approaches AHIP members are taking to ensure continued coverage and address surprise billing, while focusing on the big picture issues of social determinants of health and systemic racism -- all while working within state budgets that have been strained by the pandemic. What interventions will have the greatest impact, both today and in the future?

In his New York Times best-selling book "The Price We Pay," Dr. Marty Makary discusses the worsening crisis of high health care costs and the impact on quality of care. Is price transparency the answer? Listen to the latest podcast episode for Dr. Makary's perspective and hear about his work as a Johns Hopkins surgeon and professor of public health, where he is researching ways to bridge the divide between cost and quality.

Electronic health records give providers an enormous amount of information, but finding relevant patient information can be like finding a needle in a haystack. The result: cognitive overload for providers, leading to wasted time and physician burnout. In this episode, 3M User Experience (UX) Design Team Lead Anna Abovyan explores ways to reduce the cognitive load on physicians by designing technology that is intuitive, easy to use, and helps, not hinders patient care.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put extraordinary stress on state Medicaid budgets. Enrollment is increasing, along with direct and indirect costs, at a time of declining state revenues. What can be done to mitigate these issues? CareMore Health, an integrated health plan and care delivery system for Medicare and Medicaid patients, is moving away from fee-for-service incentives to provide comprehensive care to its high needs/high cost patients. In this episode, Dr. Theresa Brown and Dr. Vibin Roy discuss the success of the CareMore Health clinical model, where clinicians and community resources are aligned and coordinated as a team.

During this time of COVID-19, we've seen a striking increase in the use of telemedicine services. The Inside Angle podcast revisits an episode featuring telemedicine pioneer Barb Johnston, co-founder and CEO of HealthLinkNow, a network of clinicians providing mental health services to patients online. With nearly two decades of experience in implementing telemedicine programs, including the creation of the California Telemedicine Network (CTN), she brings her veteran perspective to the table in discussing the regulations, payment policies and technology needed to achieve the well-documented benefits of virtual health care.

There are thousands of wellness apps, devices, wearables and telehealth tools that can be used for chronic disease management and patient health monitoring at home. Although new technologies can lead to early identification of health concerns, they may also lead to unnecessary interventions that result in unintended complications and worse outcomes. In this episode, we reconnect with Juggy Jagannathan, PhD, AI evangelist for 3M, to consider which people are most likely to benefit from new care tools and strategies.

Immigrant communities and underserved populations experience disparities in care due to high poverty, limited access, cultural or linguistic differences, and other concerns. In this episode, Dr. Gordon Moore talks with Iliana Gilman, the former chief executive officer of El Buen Samaritano, an organization serving the Latino immigrant community in Austin, TX. With a team dedicated to breaking down barriers to care, El Buen Samaritano is improving outcomes by tackling social determinants of health.

As a palliative care physician, Dr. Beth Wolf experienced the complexity of communication. As she helped patients and families navigate issues related to pain or end-of-life care, she saw that the way clinicians communicate with each other was rich with opportunity for misunderstanding. So, how do we help physicians accurately document a patient’s true burden of illness without disrupting the delivery of efficient and compassionate care? Now, as a documentation champion at Roper St. Francis Healthcare (and an advisor to 3M), Dr. Wolf trains physicians on how to incorporate accurate and concise clinical documentation into their work with patients.

When public health initiatives account for 90 percent of improvements in population health, what is the role of the care delivery system in addressing non-medical or social factors that drive outcomes? For Nico Pronk, PhD, President of the HealthPartners Institute and Chief Science Officer at HealthPartners, it means finding the right balance between caring for the urgent needs of a community and enhancing the vital conditions of a community, such as affordable housing, healthy food accessibility, and early childhood education. Based on the success of HealthPartners' Power Up 4 Kids program and other intiatives, Dr. Pronk discusses an approach that pays careful attention to the needs of a community and engages local stakeholders to improve the chances of good outcomes.

As the largest health insurance program in the country, providing the majority of mental health care and long-term services and support, Medicaid is an indispensable component of the U.S. healthcare system. Matt Salo, Executive Director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, works with state Medicaid agencies around the nation to improve quality, cost and the experience of care for patient populations that are most vulnerable. Our host, Dr. Gordon Moore sat down with Matt Salo to discuss the state of Medicaid in 2020 and beyond.

How can artificial intelligence help physicians who are overloaded with quality measures and administrative tasks that pull them away from patient care? Can AI help address the alarming increase in exhaustion and depression among clinicians? In his second Inside Angle podcast episode, Juggy Jagannthan, Ph.D., research director and AI evangelist at 3M MModal, explains how AI can ease the administrative burden by capturing the clinician/patient interaction in real time.

State Medicaid agencies are under enormous pressure to reduce costs while maintaining quality of care for Medicaid beneficiaries. In this podcast episode, Dr. Gordon Moore talks with Billy Millwee, former Texas Medicaid director and now consultant to Medicaid programs across the U.S. Mr. Millwee discusses his work to help state agencies understand value-based payment, pursue waivers, and address social determinants of health. Each state brings different ideas to the table. Which approach works best? By creating the right incentives, state Medicaids can bolster innovation to improve outcomes and lower costs.

What is your opinion of U.S. health care? That's the question Dr. Paul Gordon asked of average Americans he met while biking coast to coast on a three-month sabbatical from his family medicine practice. His goal? Amplify the voices of those in rural areas and small towns to help clinicians be better practitioners---and listeners---when it comes to their patients.

In 2016, BayCare Health System took on its high readmission rates by launching seven different programs to lower readmissions. The problem? The programs were in silos, so overall results didn't meet objectives. In this episode, Teri Sholder, BayCare Health Senior Vice President and Chief Quality Officer, describes how the BayCare team used data analytics to break down silos and consolidate initiatives into "power combos" that help BayCare Health better achieve its goal of reducing readmissions.

In part one of his podcast episode, Dr. John Wasson, Professor Emeritus at Dartmouth Medical School, suggests U.S. health care could learn a few lessons on quality improvement from the world of organized crime. This time around, Dr. Wasson dives into the issue of clinician burnout caused by "quantophrenia"---a condition he describes as measurement for its own sake without real benefit to patients or providers. The solution to quantophrenia? Just seven simple measures.

Providers are increasingly overwhelmed by administrative work that takes them away from patient care. How can clinicians leverage AI solutions to optimize and modernize care without adding to already taxing levels of burnout? AI Evangelist V. Juggy Jagannathan, PhD, shares his expertise on artificial intelligence, deep learning and more in this episode.