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When Consolidation Isn’t About Pricing Leverage: How Ballad Health Merged Two Systems to Reduce Costs and Reinvent Rural Healthcare
Healthcare is Hard: A Podcast for Insiders
English - June 17, 2021 08:00 - 38 minutes - 26.8 MB - ★★★★ - 25 ratingsMedicine Health & Fitness Business Investing healthcare health systems healthcare innovation digital health venture capital Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
In the United States, more than 90% of the landmass is rural. And in rural communities from coast to coast, the challenges in delivering healthcare can be very different than the urban and suburban centers that get most of the attention.
There’s untapped opportunity in reimagining healthcare business models and the technology that will enable them in rural areas, according to Ballad Health CEO, Alan Levine. And he should know – in the three years since Ballad was formed by merging Wellmont Health System and Mountain States Health Alliance, it has had exceptional success rewriting the rules of rural healthcare.
Among some of its visible and measurable improvements, Ballad Health has decreased pricing by an average of 17% for urgent care and other physician-based services, cut its mortality rate for trauma in half, reduced low acuity admissions by 16,000 per year, and saved the region in which it operates more than $200 million per year in healthcare costs. And it’s doing this with only a 20% commercial payer mix.
In this episode of Healthcare is Hard, Alan talks to Keith Figlioli about how Ballad Health is achieving these milestones by better understanding the dynamics of rural healthcare and making big structural changes to address them. He shares specifics about many of the changes Ballad has already implemented and his plans to continue down this revolutionary path. Their conversation covers topics including:
To hear Alan and Keith talk about these topics and more, listen to this episode of Healthcare is Hard.