Reflections from 2024 KLAS K2 Summit

Last week, Walker Hale and I from Clarify Health Solutions had a chance to join a small group of leaders from health plans, providers, and healthtech vendors at the KLAS Research K2 Collaborative Payer/Provider Summit in Salt Lake City. The goal of the summit is to improve efficiency in healthcare by encouraging payer and providers to connect, engage, and collaborate on shared goals.

I want to share a few key takeaways that stuck out for me from this conference, given our position at Clarify where we serve as the intersection point between payer and providers with aligned incentives around achieving better outcomes for patients:

• Adam Gale , CEO of KLAS Research kicked off the summit getting us all excited about BYU basketball which he and his 5 (or was it 6 Adam Gale ?!) kids live and breathe. The moral of his story, told through BYU coaching changes and how fans remember the truth vs. the reality, is that the headlines judge the provider-payer relationship but our worst moments, and not our best. Outside of the contract negotiations and disputes, there is a lot of good happening in these relationships that is emblematic of the progress we've made between payer and providers in recent years. It reminds of the work I see from Nick Lefeber at Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island or Abby Milloy and Jeslie Jacob at Elevance Health devoting a lot of time and energy to the success of their provider partners.
• Another session that stood out to me was presented by Tyler Creager of Cigna Healthcare and Tarik Ketin of N1 Health . Cigna has spent a lot of effort in personalizing how they message to their members to drive better results, even as specific as letting members choose between rewards for completing health activities. The result is a much more engaged membership with 6x increase in the number of annual wellness visits for high-risk members but more importantly that have a real relationship with Cigna.
• Humana 's Glenn Raley presented with Kevin Worrall of Epic on the Epic payer platform and their ability to incorporate clinical data into the claims review process to improve denial rates from that data not available. Through better connecting with their health system partners and pulling out encounter and clinical data, they were able to "move data to the user, not users searching for the data" and achieve 27% faster claims adjudication.
• The summit was keynoted by Michael Westover , VP of Data Partnerships and Informatics at Providence , on the future of provider-payer dynamics. Michael went deep on interoperability standards and national data networks, but what really stuck out to me were the real-life examples. Michael talked about how during VBC contract negotiations, they payer comes to the table with a PowerPoint, PDF, or Excel document that holds all the sacred rules and specs of a value-based contract. His team has 2 full-time people responsible for translating that into their internal tracking system for them to manage against. A process ripe for error and detracting from employees working at the top of their licensure to delivery high-quality patient care. Better interoperability creates massive efficiency and productivity gains. His final thought for providers was about choosing partners based on the data they will share. All data must flow back and forth. If a health plan is not willing to share all the data, they at Providence can not take any sort of risk against that. We must level the playing field and ensure all parties have access to same, complete, data in an accessible and usable form.

?

Thank you again to the KLAS team for inviting and I'm looking forward to next year!