Had a great conversation with an old friend yesterday; he runs a mid-sized work comp insurer and is one of the most forward-looking executives in this industry.

The discussion worked its way around a wide range of topics, as these conversations usually do, before settling on failure – there it took an interesting twist.

Put simply, failure is under-rated.

Athletes learn more from missing the ball, failing to score, blowing the assignment, over-training than they do from winning. If you win, there’s much less motivation – and reason – to look for things that can be improved.

If you don’t win, there’s lots of reasons to figure out why. Of course you can get too deep into this, spend too much time dwelling on the problems and become fatalistic and negative. If one avoids that trap, one can learn a lot and be much better prepared for the next contest.

As a case study, look at Kaiser.  The huge health plan invested $400 million in a new Electronic Health Record project which failed. Rather than fire the team, blow up the effort, and forget about it, then-CEO George Halvorson doubled down, and the final investment was $4 billion – roughly $444 per member.

One reason – the EHR stripped out a lot of unnecessary cost and streamlined patient interactions:

Just having an electronic health record that is connected with all the systems that have to do with delivery of care to a patient means you don’t have patients taking duplicate tests. In the United States, I believe the cost of duplicate testing is about 15 to 17 percent of the total health care spend. We [Kaiser] don’t have that cost.

In talking with my colleague, we both marveled at the fortitude of Kaiser; if someone in work comp made even a $4 million “mistake” in a systems implementation – or anything else for that matter – their head would be on the block.

That’s one reason innovation is so rare in workers’ comp – the tolerance for failure is low indeed. With that tolerance for failure is an inability to learn, to take risks, to get better faster.

What does that mean for you?

Risk has rewards, but rarely in workers’ comp.

In any very mature industry – and workers’ comp is certainly that, certain truths are immutable. Scale, margin compression, consolidation are all inevitable – or at least two out of three are.

Innovation – mostly “small i” innovation – can and will help smaller entities compete with goliaths, and large companies maintain and even grow margins.

The innovations I’m speaking of are the tweaks, efficiencies, streamlined processes and smoother customer interactions that make vendors easier to work with. Front-line customers benefit from these small innovations, sometimes almost without noticing them.

• What used to take two phone calls now is done automatically.
• Medical services are scheduled, visits conducted, and progress reports prepared and delivered with no action by front-line customers needed
• Bills that had to be reviewed line-by-line are now auto-qdjudicated, with only those lines or bills that qualify via a rules engine hitting the front-line person’s queue.
• Medical services are automatically authorized, with relevant guideline language attached.
• Medical service reports are auto-uploaded to the claim file, with only those issues needing attention highlighted for review.

What’s easy to lose track of is the purpose of automation and innovation. The primary purpose is NOT to make the vendor more efficient and reduce vendor costs; it should be to deliver better service to the end user, be they provider, patient, front-line customer.

Therein lies the trap. In a mad dash to strip out cost and improve “efficiency”, many service companiess don’t pay near enough attention – if they pay any attention at all – to how those changes affect the end-user.

For a while, those “improvements” will reduce costs and add to profits. Then, as front-line users suffer in voice-mail hell, or can’t find anyone to answer their questions, or have to ask for another password to enter a “portal” for the umpteenth time, revenues will start to decrease.

Instead, focus your innovation efforts on those that will make your end users happier, less stressed, and less busy.

Take work off their desk/workstand and put it on yours.

That’s innovation that delivers long-term results.

 

 

 

There are two big takeaways – the price, and why Paradigm paid so much.

Sources indicate Paradigm has bought Foresight for around $150 million, a huge multiple for a relatively small company with trailing earnings of less than $5 million.

Foresight’s niche is narrow but important – the company’s core business is negotiating prices for implantable surgical devices. More recently the company entered the surgical services business with Encompass, a network of surgeons and facilities.

The announcement was pretty much what you’d expect, but the real news is why Paradigm paid what it did. First, a little history.

I’ll admit to wavering between being impressed with Paradigm and thinking it won’t ever become a significant force in the industry. As noted previously, the company has been around for the better part of three decades, and throughout that time has seemed to be just a year or so away from really breaking out.

Today’s no different.

That’s not to say Paradigm doesn’t have deep expertise and hasn’t produced excellent results for some clients – it most certainly has. The problem is two-fold; the original marketing message is tough – we can manage the really tough claims better than your claims staff can. Hard to see how a claims exec would jump at the chance to show a third party is better at a critical core skill than her or his staff.

The second is what Paradigm missed back then, and I’d suggest still doesn’t understand., Payers don’t like vendors that only solve part of their problem. What I mean is this – Paradigm asks a payer to give them data on claims that meet specific criteria. Then, Paradigm winnows thru those claims, picking the ones it can fix, and sending the rest back.

Wrong approach.

If a payer sends you a big bunch of problems, you should figure out a way to help with ALL OF THEM.

That may be one reason Paradigm recently bought a couple of case management companies; in addition to diversifying revenue sources and adding customers, the deals bring more ownership of nurses who will likely be used to service the cat claims that are Paradigm’s core business. That said, case management is a declining business under strong price pressure – just what you’d expect in a very mature industry.

Which brings us to Foresight.

Diversification, technology, and data on surgeries are all going to help Paradigm diversify even more.  And, the surgical network may provide a consistent and growing revenue stream to complement the case management and somewhat-less-predictable catastrophic case business.  It’s likely margins in the implant and surgical businesses are going to be much higher than case management and more in keeping with Paradigm’s cat case business.

From this outside perspective, this is the reason Paradigm’s owner Summit paid what it did. They’ve owned Paradigm for almost 2.5 years, and it’s time to get things ramped up for another equity event in the next few years.

What does this mean for you?

Good news indeed for anyone looking to sell their workers’ comp business!