Oliver Wyman

Summit Live 2020

Recap Day 2

The 2020 Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Summit convened over 400 executives and key influencers for discussion around Future Truths: Inevitable and Inspiring. The following recap showcases the events and dialogue from our virtual Summit. 

For more information on our future truths, read our new Health Innovation Journal Volume 4.

Inevitable Predictions Were Made, Inspiring Conversations Were Had

Greg A. Adams, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Kaiser Permanente, shared what his first year (during a pandemic) being a CEO looked like. It was a role he didn’t expect to have. Making this transition, he said, was an opportunity for his organization to step back and reconsider their status quo. Greg said in his role, he served as a catalyst for change and helped his organization better understand both their planning processes and where they needed to head next. Greg urged leaders to create new models and approaches and support people in new roles to respond to the market faster. The pandemic, he said, has made people more open to change. But like any situation, it’s a time that requires especially strong leadership. 

Sendhil Mullainathan, Roman Family University Professor of Computation and Behavioral Science, University of Chicago Booth, discussed why artificial intelligence has great room for improvement. Algorithms fail, he said, not because of engineering, but because of the data used to construct them. He also discussed the geographic distribution of American cohorts that train deep learning algorithms. If we want a good future for artificial intelligence in healthcare, we have to build the right data infrastructure, he explained. Data supply chains, for example, create very uneven market power, he said. Fixing data plumbing is therefore the biggest problem for artificial intelligence that healthcare faces today.

Nadja West, MD, Lieutenant General (retired), the 44th US Army Surgeon General, and the Former Commanding General US Army Medical Command, joined William Frist, MD, Former Senate Majority Leader; Founding Partner, Frist Cressey Ventures, to discuss inclusion and diversity, empathy in leadership, health inequity, and the obesity crisis. One in two people, said Nadja, who volunteer for the Army, Navy, Air Force, and the Marines are turned down because of their poor health. She also emphasized that empathy is the most important quality a leader can possess. It’s critical as a leader to understand the people you work with on a personal level, like what their dreams, hopes, fears, and beliefs are, she said. Added Bill, leaders want to have diversity and inclusion discussions within their own companies, entities, and nonprofits. But one key hindrance is leaders often feel uncomfortable doing so because they don’t want to unintentionally offend someone. Terms like LatinX, for example, (a gender-neutral or nonbinary alternative to Latino or Latina), added Nadja, are often ones people aren’t generally familiar with. This year, nonetheless, is one where there’s an incredible opportunity amidst social unrest to talk about diversity and inclusion in innovative ways, she told attendees.

Mandy Cohen, MD, Secretary, North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, chatted with Noah Higgins-Dunn, CNBC.com, about the intersection of public health and communication. When a reputable source changes their pandemic facts, for example, this puts reporters in an odd position as they must then change their narratives on the fly to align with evolving news. They also discussed why a greater lack of concise and easy to understand communication on behalf of leaders is distorting what “truth” really means. In early February, North Carolina was already bringing stakeholders together and had a decent hold on the pandemic as it began to spread nationwide, Mandy said. Preparation was key to help North Carolina get a hold of COVID-19. It was when Wuhan built a hospital from the ground up in a matter of days that made her realize the pandemic was something to be taken very seriously. In the beginning, ground truth was critical, said Mandy. She strived to communicate simple messages about really hard topics and communicate openly about a topic that was evolving in front of everyone's eyes. Trust, she emphasized, is built before a crisis starts and must be part of public health efforts to protect the greater public. Government leaders have a specific opportunity with the flu vaccine, for example, to build trust ahead of the COVID-19 vaccine, Mandy stressed.

Ashish Jha, MD, Dean, Brown University School of Public Health, joined Ellen Zane, Chief Executive Officer Emeritus, Tufts Medical Center, to discuss affordability in healthcare. They examined the American narrative surrounding sky-high healthcare costs. They also explored how a single-payer healthcare system in the US might affect the price of care delivery. Said Ellen, American consumers tend to want access to everything when they want it. This healthcare appetite, she said, is driving healthcare costs. Added Ashish, when you look at US utilization patterns, usage is pretty average. The US, for instance, has fewer doctors, fewer hospitalizations, and is about average on testing and procedures regarding things like MRIs and hip replacements, he added. But everything in the US costs so much more, he noted, and therefore, the underlying problem isn’t utilization. Ellen added that one of the drivers of this problem is pricing variation. There can be as much as a 40 percent disparity from one healthcare system to the other, she said. The total medical expense for individuals versus the unit cost is the right focus for leaders, said Ellen.

Photo Gallery

Check out some of what happened on day two of the Health Innovation Summit including hand-drawn scribes artfully covering our main stage sessions. 

Overheard at the Summit

So much of what we lead the nation in doing has occurred through innovation and creation in an organization.
Greg A. Adams, Chairman and CEO, Kaiser Permanente
Algorithms fail, not because of engineering, but because of the data used to construct them.
Sendhil Mullainathan, Roman Family University Professor of Computation and Behavioral Science, University of Chicago Booth
We have an opportunity with the flu vaccine to build trust ahead of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Mandy Cohen, MD, Secretary, North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services

Executive Sessions

Carolyn Jasik, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Omada Health, and Julie Yoo, General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz, discussed how to shift physician and consumer mindsets regarding perceptions of digital therapeutics. Payers need to stop thinking of digital therapeutics as a product and instead think of them as providers, she said. Added Julie, there’s a key opportunity for socialized solutions such as gamification techniques from popular apps like Roblox or TikTok to be better explored or adapted successfully across healthcare.

Toyin Ajayi, Co-founder and Chief Health Officer, CityBlock Health, joined David Ansell, Senior Vice President, for Community Health Equity, Rush University Medical Center, to discuss the key community and organizational drivers of health inequity, social afflictions, and racial bias. Said Toyin, the healthcare system as a whole has yet to engender trust. Health equity at the basic level, she said, is about who needs more and how they can receive more. Added David, dismantling the healthcare system and getting to what matters are critical future imperatives leaders must address.

Kim Keck, Chief Executive Officer, BCBSRI, joined David Vivero, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Amino, to share their views on how healthcare’s shift to value-based care is creating unprecedented opportunities for big change. The healthcare industry is at a pivotal point of change, said Kim, who pushed for new models and a broader definition of value. She emphasized that convenience tied to factors like the patient experience, predictability, cost, and affordability are critical components of value in healthcare. Added David, the traditional definition of “value” in healthcare does not translate to how consumers define "value" in their own lives. Once we close that gap and reorient people’s minds to a redefined viewpoint, he said, we’ll begin to dig out of the hole we’ve dug for ourselves with respect to member trust and rapport.

Stephen Klasko, MD, President, Thomas Jefferson University and Chief Executive Officer of Jefferson Health, joined Hemant Taneja, Managing Director, General Catalyst, to discuss how to innovate responsibly. The next tipping point for transformation, they said, comes down to well-designed technology partnerships. Stephen specifically emphasized the need to teach doctors about the use cases for artificial intelligence. Added Hemant, the healthcare market, unlike other sectors, must be shrunk down. He advised leaders to think about how to take more cost out of the system. Consumers, said Hemant, don’t want a product where they have to plug their health numbers into it 47 times a day; what they really want at the end of the day is better health.

Caleb Gallifant, Vice President of Product Development and Partnership, Humana, Aimee Quirk, Chief Executive Officer, innovationOchsner, and Jami Doucette, President of Premise Health, convened to talk about the future of digital-first health plans and what some of their greatest potential benefits are in terms of access, quality, cost, and more. Caleb defined “digital-first” as being something where members dictate their preferences. Distinguishing preference versus what’s actually available to someone, he said, is critical. Added Aimee, in order to create a care model that allows for longitudinal care, relationships must allow for care management. Re-engineering care models, said Aimee, have great potential to drive a new movement where completely virtual models help patients better manage their chronic conditions. Jami connected this to the current COVID-19 experience, which has driven greater comfort in digital treatment for the silent and baby boomer generations who can benefit most.

Ankit Jain, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Infinitus Systems, Daniel Nathrath, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, Ada Health, and Andrea Thomaz, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, Diligent Robotics, discussed some artificial intelligence solutions they think are truly revolutionary for healthcare leaders to better understand and leverage.

Dismantling the healthcare system and getting to what matters is what we have to get to in the future.
David Ansell, SVP for Community Health Equity, Rush University
The secret to value is convenience.
David Vivero, Co-Founder and CEO, Amino
What is a digital-first health plan? Leveraging digital capabilities for members to access the care they need, when they want it.
Caleb Gallifant, VP of Product Development and Partnership, Humana

Recap Day 1

The 2020 Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Summit convened over 400 executives and key influencers for discussion around Future Truths: Inevitable and Inspiring. The following recap showcases the events and dialogue from our virtual Summit. 

For more information on our future truths, read our new Health Innovation Journal Volume 4.

Can You Handle the Truth?

Parie Garg, PhD, Partner, Oliver Wyman, kicked off our general sessions. Parie talked about how because of the remarkable changes the healthcare industry has undergone, 2020 has been the year we've proven we can go further and faster when pressed. She highlighted key difficulties the industry faced this year, like that one in five physicians have been laid off or furloughed, or how 20 rural hospitals shuttered earlier this year. The days of building enormous hospitals, she said, are history. Parie dared attendees to meet consumers where they are and to open their schedules to meet new patient demand. She also dared attendees to reconsider their infrastructures.

Aneesh Chopra, President, CareJourney, who served in the Obama Administration as the first US Chief Technology Officer, chatted with Tim Spence, President, Fifth Third Bancorp, about why healthcare is an information business. Together, they drew lessons from the financial services industry about things like consumer trust, data transactions, and privacy regulations that are also applicable to the healthcare industry. They also broke down three chapters of the FinTech revolution (a term Tim noted is really just an artifact of the past six or seven years in the financial services sector). Tim said reducing complexity so consumers can more easily make choices has a powerful and profound direct benefit, both on all our businesses and across greater society.

Fyodor Urnov, Professor, University of California Berkeley; Scientific Director, Technology and Translation, Innovative Genomics Institute, discussed topics like the inheritance of sickle cell anemia, programming Cas9 with Single-Guide RNAs, tackling the opioid epidemic, and how gene therapy can help cure children of disease. He discussed his colleague Jennifer A. Doudna's recent Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He emphasized how a gene therapy cure for sickle will cost nearly $1.8 million. CRISPR, he said, is a cure, but a cure in principle. Out of 5,000 genetic diseases, only 10 are being pursued, he added. We have to improve the way we get CRISPR machinery to patients' cells and we have to work with regulators that make sure the path for pre-clinical and early-stage clinical is maximally configured, he said.

Daniel Kraft, MD, Chair for Medicine and Neuroscience, Singularity University; Founder and Chair, Exponential Medicine, chatted with Jennifer Schneider, MD, President, Livongo, about what's next for connected health. Livongo, said Jennifer, has over 400,000 active diabetes members. With numbers like these, there is great opportunity to leverage data so it becomes more personalized, she added. Jennifer stressed the importance of creating an overarching, personalized experience that allows for the collection of usable and actionable data as a result. Jennifer emphasized the importance of building an experience where people feel appreciated and welcomed, versus judged.

Rana el Kaliouby, Co-founder and CEO, Affectiva, talked about the intersection of emotions and artificial intelligence. Five key trends, she said, are humanizing artificial intelligence in health technology: quantifying disorders like mental health, telemedicine, healthcare cohorts, virtual therapists, and mitigating biases. Over 90 percent of how we communicate is non-verbal, she said, and only 10 percent is in the actual choice of our words. Virtual assistants, she said, are being designed to be more emotionally intelligent. They're also now able to better decipher subtle speech or gesture cues, for example. She pointed, for example, to inventions like glasses that help autistic children better read people's emotions by sending them visual cues that appear right on their lenses, in the style of Google Glass. But she also emphasized the importance of designing and deploying algorithms to avoid bias that hinders inclusion and diversity progress. Rana predicted we'll see many more nurse avatars in the future and that nurses will be able to care for ten times the number of patients by essentially outsourcing their abilities over to virtual.

Overheard at the Summit

There's nothing like the majesty of CRISPR-Cas9 in action. Marvel at how this ancient, billion-year-old molecular machine unfolds as if it were some ancient creature, like an ent out of 'The Lord of the Rings.'
Fyodor Urnov, Scientific Director, Technology and Translation, Innovative Genomics Institute
Good doctors translate medical understanding into words that motivate people. It's that simple.
Jennifer Schneider, MD, President, Livongo
The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of telehealth, which means we can now quantify empathy and correlate it to patient outcomes.
Rana el Kaliouby, Co-founder and CEO, Affectiva

Photo Gallery

Check out some of what happened on day one of the Health Innovation Summit including hand-drawn scribes artfully covering our main stage sessions. 

Executive Sessions

John Jesser, President, Clinical Solutions, Amwell, talked about the increasing consumer demand for medical care delivered via video. Virtual care's rise to fame amidst COVID-19, he said, means innovative technology will eventually redefine all different aspects of care delivery, including helping more people get help for mental health issues, making healthcare more accessible across the board, and transforming what the standard primary care appointment looks like. He also talked about generational differences among people like Baby Boomers, Millennials, and others regarding who is more likely to have a primary care physician, use telehealth services, and more.

Jared Josleyn, Vice President of Innovation, Walgreens, joined Sara Vaezy, Chief Digital Strategy and Business Officer, Providence, to discuss how healthcare's entry points are in flux. Although healthcare has a plethora of "new front doors," some will be better positioned than others to expand their consumer offerings. Said Jared, although many consumer expectations for healthcare engagement are neither easy nor realistic, there's an opportunity for a multi-door, collaborative, continuous care experience that works for the average consumer. Added Sara, in the future, a challenge of "new front doors" is creating an entry point that makes sense to consumers, ultimately leading them to the optimal care experience.

Imelda Dacones, MD, Chief Executive Officer and President, Northwest Permanente, joined Bill Lamoreaux, Chief Executive Officer, IMC Health, to discuss rapidly evolving workforce expectations. They envisioned talent, training, resources, and reallocation looking quite different in the future compared to today. They also discussed how it takes a different kind of skillset to learn and deliver care through video and other venues. Adaptability, said Imelda, is a critical skill regarding how both tools and the workplace itself are evolving rapidly.

Chip Blaufuss, Vice President of Strategy and Innovation, HCA, joined Sean O’Grady, Chief Operating Officer, Northshore University HealthSystem, and Angela Profeta, Chief Strategy Officer, CityMD / Summit Medical Group, to explore why healthcare is hardly a one-size-fits-all industry. Expect a stark recalibration of care delivery, they emphasized. Chip predicted that within the next five years, there will be a massive proliferation of both brick and mortar and telehealth sites. But that over the next few years, they may not all be connected, therefore leading to consumer confusion.

Eva Borden, Managing Director for Behavioral and Medical Solutions, Cigna, joined Omar Dawood, MD, Chief Medical Officer and Head of Sales, Calm, to discuss how mental health and wellness have been dominating recent mainstream health conversations. Taking care of your mental health, they said, should be considered equally as valuable as eating well and exercising. The mental health space, said Eva, is a ripe opportunity to do things very differently. Omar emphasized leaders focus on leveraging consumer-based opportunites. The mind should be considered as something you exercise, he said.

Brenda Battle, Vice President, Urban Health Initiative and Chief Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Officer, UChicago Medicine, joined Daniel Fulwiler, President and Chief Executive Officer, Esperanza Health Centers, and Barb Gray, Senior Vice President for Social Determinants of Health, Highmark Health, to talk about social determinants of health. A winning strategy to implement, they said, involves creating a portfolio of internal and external solutions, versus merely looking to scale broadly. One key point made was about how anti-poverty needs point to treating social determinants of health less as "determinants" and more like "symptoms" or "indicators" of greater underlying conditions. Another key point was how asthma is one of the biggest reasons children miss school. Inhalers, for instance, being more accessible has benefits that go well beyond just health alone.

Brad Greenawalt, Vice President of Membership, Peloton, joined Karen Hanlon, COO, Highmark Health, and Rami Karjian, Chief Executive Officer, Medically Home Inc., to talk about what care delivery in the confines of someone's home looks like in terms of price, experience, and outcome. Someone's home, they argued, is the optimal care delivery location. Said Karen, healthcare needs to become more proactive and digitally- enabled. Added Rami, the home is now at the center of our care ecosystem and because of the pandemic, consumers really won't perceive home care the same ever again.

Thirty-seven percent of Generation Z do not have a primary care physician. The brick and mortar may not work for them.”
John Jesser, President, Clinical Solutions, Amwell
"The best 'front door' is one that connects patients with integrated care."
Angela Profeta, Chief Strategy Officer, CityMD / Summit Medical Group
Treat your mind like a muscle.
Omar Dawood, MD, Chief Medical Officer and Head of Sales, Calm