One of the most significant opportunities that we have within the Sutter Health|Aetna joint venture is to rethink the way members, employees and their dependents experience their health plan and their health coverage and the overall benefit experience.
You're really able to leverage best in class clinical capabilities that Sutter brings to the table, along with the deep analytics and member-facing tools that Aetna brings.
To really create an integrated delivery model where you are not only bringing down costs, but really creating a much more seamless experience for the patient.
We can bring more affordable, higher quality, and more convenient care to the public.
Sutter Health and Aetna are storied brands that have been around for many years.
Both are recognized leaders in their respective spaces. Both parties, Sutter and Aetna, have made significant capital commitments to innovate within the joint venture in ways that are uniquely relevant in the Northern California market. We really have aligned with a shared vision. We have shared accountabilities and goals.
At the end of the day, what we're really looking to do is change how health care is delivered in these communities that we serve. We had a common goal of improving the experience and the affordability and the performance of the products, as well as the capabilities and the expertise.
We've been thinking and innovating around new front doors, new access points for patients. And they're not always physical. Sometimes they're going to be virtual.
Patients who have an immediate need that’s maybe at the lower end of intensity, have better access to clinical services in a more convenient and a lower cost setting. We’re really focused on streamlining that access to make it much more simple.
We want to make sure that we can see patients on their terms, when they need to, and what's most convenient for them. What you've got today in most delivery models is, you've got clinical data that lives on the provider side and you've got claim data that lives on the health plan side.
When you marry those two together, it’s really a rich and robust sort of environment.
We might be able to reach out proactively to patients, to provide resources and education to help sort of fine-tune their health care regimen to keep them healthy. The challenge is getting the right care, in the right setting, at the right time. And frankly to reintroduce the member in the middle of that equation.
What all of this is about, ultimately, is putting the patient and the member at the center of care, and making sure that we have created a holistic system that really optimizes their health care.
Employers really are interested in having both affordable care and care that’s accessible and available to their employee base. What we are able to do by coming together is to not only lower your costs, right out the gate, but to also create more productivity, less absenteeism.
There’s significant things we can do to give employers unprecedented visibility into their cost trends and the things that are driving the expenses in their benefit plans.
At its core, this is about innovation.
This is about two organizations taking risks on the future and trying to evolve health care to work better. We have the opportunity to build something transformative in a large and important market. You sit around the table, and you’ve been in health care for 30 years.
What have you got to show for it? Well, this is it.
