Frank Pennachio is one of those people every industry really needs. He’s blunt, outspoken, deeply insightful and completely unafraid to challenge established practices.

Especially when those practices need to be challenged. Thursday at NWCDC, Frank and Denise Algire discussed the ways employers pay for managed care services, and how those are often disconnected entirely from the quality of the care delivered to patients.

Frank’s key question is this; do managed care programs improve care or create revenue for intermediaries?

My take is both. I’d also echo Frank’s view that employers and brokers are just as culpable, if not more so, than claims payers and managed care companies. Employers’ desire for simplistic fee arrangements and unwillingness or inability to dive deeper into fee arrangements force (or allow, depending on your perspective) TPAs to seek revenues elsewhere.

Transparency is what’s missing; contracts between and among TPAs and employers don’t allow employers to see the financial relationships between the TPA and managed care companies and providers and understand the motivations and incentives inherent in those relationships.

Fee arrangements are the key to the puzzle. TPAs charge employers a flat per claim fee or a loss conversion factor (losses x X.XX%) to cover the cost of handling claims, and that’s pretty much the only thing the employer looks at or cares about.  Thus, allocated loss adjustment expenses are rarely addressed. What employers should be paying attention to are undisclosed side agreements and Allocated Loss Adjustment Expense bucket, where those fees end up charged to the file.

Frank showed a report from an employer that identified bill review fees of over $500,000 for some 4600 bills.  Of course, this was based on a fee structure using a percentage of savings below billed charges – an arrangement that like vampires just won’t die.  Frank noted that many bill review companies are quite willing to charge a flat per-bill fee that includes networks, medical management, and other “savings”. (I have a somewhat different perspective and believe the price per bill should be considerably higher, but fundamentally agree with Frank)Part of me is stunned that we are still talking about this. This has been a subject of conversation many times over many years, and yet, here we are. And here we’ll stay until and unless employers demand something different – and

Albertson’s is one of the few large employers challenging this paradigm. Denise shared Albertsons’ network contracting strategy, and of particular interest were the outcomes measures they use. Albertson’s is quite willing to pay for better outcomes, and is diligent in tying outcomes to providers.

So what can you do?

1. Require full disclosure of all fees and side arrangements among and between your TPA and other parties.
2. Require reporting of all funds transfers
3. Realize you are going to have to pay higher per claim fees and/or higher unallocated loss adjustment expenses.
4. Require documentation and reporting on quality measures for all medical care including networks.
5. Be willing to pay more for better outcomes.

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.