Jeffrey Hogan Discusses Helping Health Care Payers Create Pandemic Infrastructure

The American Journal of Managed Care® (AJMC®): Hello. I'm Matthew Gavidia. Today on MJH Life Sciences™ Medical World News, The American Journal of Managed Care® is pleased to welcome Jeffrey Hogan, Northeast regional manager of the Rogers Benefit Group and member of the Board of Directors for the Connecticut Business Group on Health. Great to have you on, Jeff. Can you just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your work?

Hogan: Certainly. I've been in health care for about 35 years. I manage in New England and New York for a national benefits marketing and consultancy. We deal directly with brokers and consultants to help solve their problems. So, we handle roughly 2000 employers, many of which are self-funded. I also own a private benefits consultancy that works directly with provider groups. I serve as the regional leader for the LeapFrog Group for this region and I'm the liaison to the National Alliance Healthcare Purchasers Coalition from the Connecticut Business Group on Health. Lastly, I also serve as one of the coordinators and originators of an ad hoc group called the Connecticut Moving to Value Alliance, which is basically a big tent group that was started 4 years ago and includes all elements of the health care ecosystem in this region, focused on moving from fragmented fee-for-service need to value based arrangements.

AJMC®: Looking at the current state of the health care industry amid surging cases of COVID-19 [coronavirus disease 2019], can you speak on how your organization has advised employers and health care purchasers in their pursuit of high-value, cost-efficient health care services?

Hogan: Sure. At the end of March, we noticed, both regionally and nationally, that many of the provider organizations that weren't directly providing services for COVID and were reliant upon fee-for-service lost their volume, and many of them were forced to shut down many of their operations, which caused huge problems, obviously, for patients in that they couldn't get access to care. We still see much of that phenomenon occurring in the marketplace.

Unfortunately, many of these provider groups also didn't have the necessary virtual care infrastructure to be able to give access to employees and dependents, especially for those that were comorbid. Even those that were able to set up some telemedicine services weren't able to offer, for the most part, interoperable and longitudinal virtual care services. So, we've spent most of our time, literally since March, really accelerating practice transformation and payment reform in our regions very successfully.

COVID has incited a lot of people to get out of the entrenchment that exists in our fragile health care ecosystem. What we've been able to do is to start working with payers and providers to move them out of entrenched fee-for-service arrangements, and also to bring in some of the national players, like Vera Whole Health, for example, that had already operationalized virtual services with embedded behaviorists and nutritionists and PharmDs and had already moved to capitated methodologies by bringing these types of services into a traditionally entrenched fee-for-service marketplace. It's caused some dramatic thinking and rapid changes and we're very much involved in not only working with purchasers to bring in these new attribution models but also with payers to onboard these new technologies and payment structures for the benefit of purchasers.