4 Takeaways from VIVE 2024

If you couldn't attend the #ViVE2024 conference, here are four takeaways you don't want to miss. Highmark Health leaders joined engaging panels on multi-pronged behavioral health care, data governance and optimization, and modernizing prior authorizations. We also announced a major advancement in our #LivingHealth strategy. Get the details below.

Payer-Provider Collaborations Level Up

As a major milestone in its Living Health strategy, Highmark Health announced its collaboration with Epic and Google Cloud to support deeper coordination across payers and providers. This new level of collaboration will drive automation , support faster decision-making, and enable more holistic care. Connecting Epic's Payer Platform to Google Cloud will enable new insights to help both personalize the consumer experience and improve health outcomes. The insights, shared with payers and providers, can be used to inform consumers of the next best actions in their care journeys.

Behavioral Health is Health

David Holmberg , the president and CEO of Highmark Health, spoke on a panel about behavioral health and how the industry is (rightly so) embracing it as a foundational part of caring for the whole person. He reiterated that making it easier to access and engage with a personalized care plan and ecosystem is critical to success.

The panel also discussed how in a post-pandemic era, there is a behavioral health crisis. This crisis does not have a one-size-fits-all solution but rather requires a suite of solutions to meet people where they are in their care journey. Holmberg stated that since Highmark's launch of Mental Well-Being Powered by Spring Health on Jan. 1 of this year, almost 5,ooo members had signed up and booked thousands of appointments with little promotion. He cited another solution, Allegheny Health Network 's Chill Project , which was launched in partnership with the Pittsburgh Pirates Charities and now serves 42 schools and 50,000 students in western Pennsylvania.

Data: Garbage In, Garbage Out

Richard Clarke , the chief data and analytics officer at Highmark Health, joined a panel focused on leveraging data as a company's most valuable asset. Clarke shared that Highmark Health places an emphasis on the insights that data can bring and that AI can help lower the costs of acquiring those insights so long as the data quality is strong. While the average hospital produces 50 petabytes of data a year, nearly 80% of is unstructured and unusable. Clarke said it's key to prioritize data standardization and take an intentional approach to harnessing data and that how a company uses data can be flexible so long there is transparency around the use cases.

Don't Wait on Prior Authorizations

Highmark Inc. Chief Medical Officer Tim Law joined a panel to discuss modernizing and automating the prior authorization. The panel discussed steps the health care industry can take to innovate. Dr. Law encouraged health plans to not wait for CMS or states to create new policies but to be proactive in making the prior authorization efficient and to actively work with providers to shape medical policy . He said Highmark aims to get prior authorizations approved before a patient leaves a site of care — as fast as 90 seconds through the provider portal.

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