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-: Talk to us about the relationship with the pillars,
the structure, what is this partnership?
What does it look like?
-: Sure.
I'll start off by saying that,
we began by saying,
"What are our goals?
What are we trying to achieve?"
And I laid out some of those earlier in the conversation,
but the other intent was how do we take
all the different components and opportunities
for scale and expertise
and create sort of, a sum of the parts
where the sum is greater than the whole,
where we utilize some synergy across a number of channels
as opposed to just singular one-off
vendor type relationship.
-: Yeah.
-: And we identified three areas where we felt like
we not only could benefit from the expertise
and the technology and the strengths of Optum,
but where there was overlap,
and where together we could drive towards something greater.
And then with the intent that this would grow.
The foundation part of this was a rev cycle.
And we recognize that this would also require
some investment.
So that, rev cycle innovation really gave us
the financial opportunity to invest further
in this partnership.
And we're already starting to see that manifested
a year in.
However, there are other areas that we thought
that we could absolutely benefit
and one was around data-driven decision-making.
And so
we moved,
and Optum joined forces with our analytics team,
but that was an area we needed to invest.
We built out EPMO.
We built out a data analytics team
that isn't just, what's based in Boulder,
but I can access an actuarial scientist
that might be based here in Minnesota,
or some other data person in analytics in California
or Nashville or whatever,
depending on the project and the need,
giving us scale and access that we never could have hoped
to achieve on our own.
And the third area was,
what if we take this financial opportunity and investment
and we combine it with solid decision-making
and data to drive better decisions
and drive better clinical operations performance.
And so, finally, a partnership around and our operations.
Now we of course, retained all our clinical operations,
ourself and oversight and the personnel,
but having the teams work with us closely
to improve patient flow,
to make sure we're optimizing ORs, et cetera.
And so, not only are we're getting our patients
out of the hospital, perhaps more quickly and safely
and efficiently with better outcomes,
but many other things like,
there's a direct partnership around case management.
And with that, we've seen a continued decrease
in readmissions where we're in the top decile.
That transition from the hospital to that post acute space
making that seamless and all the technology
that can also help with that.
And then of course, that sets the foundation
for population health and population health care.
So again, the idea is these three areas,
the sum is greater than the parts.
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