Rocco Perla Explains the Importance of Patient-Centered Reform Conversations

Rocco Perla, president of Health Leads, explained that not only do stakeholders in the health system need to come together, but that the conversation also must be patient-centered to truly make headway in care reform.

Transcript (slightly modified)

How have social needs interventions rise to the top of the reform agenda in the last 6 months?

So first, I think the health system needs to come together and view itself more broadly. Payers, providers as well as the public health sector need to share accountability and leadership. So, I think traditionally what we’ve seen is that they’ve each taken a piece of the healthcare puzzle and tried to figure it out on their own. If those pieces aren’t brought together, we’ll only be marginally impactful.

Second, we need to think about putting the patient at the center of everything we do. I mentioned a couple of times we’re in a historic period with so much activity in health reform but we can actually lose the forest for the trees. We talk about payment models as a primary driver of thinking about new ways to deliver care but it’s no­­t, the payment models are in service of the patient. And if we keep the patient at the center of everything we do and engineer the payment structures and the delivery structures around the patient, we can never go wrong. So I think making sure we have our true north established is going to be our guiding light.

And then lastly, let’s look to who’s already doing this well. We’ve been working with a number of really innovative health systems, like Kaiser Permanente for example is one of our integrated delivery system partners and they’re doing amazing work. They’re really trailblazers in this space and others can look to them as an example for how to do this.

I think if we kind of put that together and focus on execution, and I think we could make some serious headway.