healthcare spending

In this episode, Justin Holland, CEO and co-founder of HealthJoy, shares his international upbringing, entrepreneurial ventures, and the personal healthcare challenge that led to the creation of HealthJoy, a platform designed to simplify healthcare choices for employees and employers alike.

With a focus on enhancing healthcare navigation and reducing costs, HealthJoy emerges as a critical partner for employers seeking to offer better healthcare solutions to their employees. Holland's journey from a skiing accident to the inception of HealthJoy highlights the universal struggle with navigating healthcare options, underscoring the platform's mission to make quality care more accessible and understandable.

Key takeaways from the episode include:

• The inspiration behind HealthJoy rooted in personal experience, emphasizing the need for simplified healthcare navigation.
• HealthJoy's approach to cost containment and personalized healthcare guidance, aiming to deliver savings to employers and improve employee health outcomes.
• The significant impact of virtual care and telemedicine, especially highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and HealthJoy's adaptation to offer a comprehensive range of virtual healthcare services.
• Holland's perspective on current and emerging challenges within the healthcare industry, including pharmacy costs, high-cost claimants, and the obesity epidemic, and HealthJoy's commitment to addressing these issues through innovative solutions.
• The importance of a seamless user experience in healthcare platforms, combining digital efficiency with human support to meet the diverse needs of users.
• The need for a platform to deliver a healthcare cost containment strategy on the back of a challenging macroeconomic environment.

Stay in Touch!

• Connect with Justin Holland on LinkedIn
• Visit HealthJoy
• Learn more about Springbuk Activate
• Get the complete 2024 Employee Health Trends report and other related resources

Connect with our co-hosts Jennifer Jones and David Pittman 

Have feedback, questions, or suggestions for show ideas? Send them to us at podcast@springbuk.com.

Please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform, and share it with your friends and colleagues. We appreciate you and thank you for listening!

Produced by David Pittman

Theme music: "Overboard" by Stay Outside

Dive into the world of high-cost claimants trends with Janet Young, MD, Clinical Analytics Advisor at Springbuk and one of the authors of the 2024 Employee Health Trends report.  The report sheds light on managing those hefty healthcare expenses. Janet describes the journey through the world of healthcare economics, beginning with a breakdown of high-cost claimants into distinct segments, then explaining how those groups differ in their influence on overall healthcare spending. The conversation then turns to the diverse health conditions within these categories, underlining the critical need to grasp these differences for crafting impactful management strategies. 

You'll hear about innovative approaches like encouraging regular cancer screenings and leveraging Centers of Excellence for top-notch care and advice, particularly vital in the priciest categories dominated by facility expenses.

What You Will Learn:

• The segmentation of high-cost claimants in healthcare and their impact on total spending
• The importance of understanding the variation in health conditions across different cost categories
• Strategies for managing high-cost claims, including early cancer screenings and leveraging Centers of Excellence

Catch the full conversation.

• Connect with Janet Young on LinkedIn
• Get the complete 2024 Employee Health Trends report and other related resources
• Connect with our co-hosts Jennifer Jones and David Pittman 

Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other popular podcast players. 

Have feedback, questions, or suggestions for show ideas? Send them to us at podcast@springbuk.com.

Please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform, and share it with your friends and colleagues. We appreciate you and thank you for listening!

Produced by David Pittman

Theme music: "Overboard" by Stay Outside

Learn more about academic opportunities in Health Policy and Law at UCSF and UC Law San Francisco.

Recently, there's been dramatic growth in the number of nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs). The number of NPs has more than tripled in the last decade while the number of PAs has almost doubled.

Yet, due to particular billing practices in Medicare, it can be difficult to know how care these clinicians are providing. That means there's a lot we don't know about access and quality related to this critical part of the health care workforce.

Ateev Mehrotra from Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center joins A Health Podyssey to discuss how we bill for nurse practitioner and physician assistant services and the implications of those practices.

Mehrotra and colleagues published a paper in the June 2022 issue of Health Affairs examining the prevalence of "indirect billing," where care provided by a PA or NP is billed under the supervising physician.

They found about 11 million instances of Medicare indirect billing in 2010 and 30 million in 2018 and estimate that eliminating indirect billing would have saved Medicare more than $190 million.

Order the June 2022 issue of Health Affairs for research on costs, care delivery, COVID-19, and more.

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Health spending currently accounts for nearly 18% of the US' Gross Domestic Product.

If the nation spends so much on health care - about $11,500 per person in the US - then are we getting a good value in return for that spending?

Last week, Health Affairs launched a newsletter for our Considering Health Spending initiative to bring readers a forum for emerging research that sheds light on how much the nation spends on health care and how we might improve the value of that spending or even change the spending trajectory.

The first issue of the monthly newsletter dives into some classic research on health care spending and value, including the seminal 2003 piece, "It's The Prices, Stupid."

On today's episode of Health Affairs This Week, Health Affairs Senior Editor Laura Tollen joins Deputy Editor Rob Lott to share details on the initiative and discuss the ways researchers are addressing key questions about health care spending and value.

Sign up for the Considering Health Spending newsletter.

Join the Considering Health Spending LinkedIn group.

Related Links:

• Considering Health Spending 
• The Relationship Between Health Spending and Social Spending In High-Income Countries: How Does The US Compare? (Health Affairs)
• Variation In Health Spending Growth For The Privately Insured From 2007 To 2014 (Health Affairs)
• What's Been The Bang For The Buck? Cost-Effectiveness Of Health Care Spending Across Selected Conditions In The US (Health Affairs)
• Getting The Price Right: How Some Countries Control Spending In A Fee-For-Service System (Health Affairs)

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In its November 30th fiscal update, Canada’s federal government tallied up the costs of COVID-19. The deficit will swell to $385 billion in 2020–21. The provinces and territories have also tallied record deficits—$92 billion, on aggregate. What do figures like these mean for our recovery? Keara talks to Chief Economist Pedro Antunes for these answers and more. 

The full story:
Challenges Ahead: Canada’s Post-Pandemic Fiscal Prospects (February 2021). View the report at https://www.conferenceboard.ca/e-library/abstract.aspx?did=10974. 

Learn more about Pedro and our other subject matter experts at https://www.conferenceboard.ca/about-cboc/our-experts. 

Access all our research at conferenceboard.ca. 

For the first time in our history our country allowed “medicine” to dictate monetary policy by mandating a lockdown and pushing us into a depression or at least exacerbating it. 

Why did the lockdown fail? How, if at all, was it successful? When are we in the clear? What does it mean to us, the common person, and our healthcare accessibility and cost? What does that mean for us as individuals and as healthcare consumers? What are the long-term ramifications of this pandemic and its impact on medicine and healthcare? Listen today as we discuss the pros and cons of the pandemic and healthcare spending.

Learn more about academic opportunities in Health Policy and Law at UCSF and UC Law San Francisco.

More than 500,000 individuals in the U.S. experience homeless at any given time, and many of those individuals qualify for Medicaid in states that expanded the program under the Affordable Care Act.

Medicaid expansion can be helpful for individuals unable to afford private health insurance. Medicaid expansion has been found to slow rates of health decline for some low-income adults, for example. But to date, little is known about the relationship between those experiencing homelessness gaining coverage through Medicaid expansion and health care service use.

With homelessness on the rise in the United States, it is important to study such trends and what implications they may have for both those experiencing homelessness and health care providers.

On today's episode of A Health Podyssey, Alan Weil interviews Dr. Jeral Self, a researcher at Mathematica and an adjunct faculty member at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, on how Medicaid expansion affected health care utilization for adults experiencing homelessness in Arkansas.

Listen to what this new data reveal about the health care needs of those experiencing homelessness.

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Learn more about academic opportunities in Health Policy and Law at UCSF and UC Law San Francisco.

Every year, Health Affairs publishes a retrospective look at national healthcare spending. In 2020, Anne Martin and colleagues from the CMS Office of the Actuary found that U.S. healthcare spending increased 4.6% to $3.8 trillion in 2019. 

The rate of health spending declined slightly from 2018, which noted a growth rate of 4.7%. Hospital care, physician and clinical services, and retail purchase of prescription drugs, which accounted for 61% of total national health spending, saw faster growth rates in spending in 2019.

These figures predate the coronavirus, which has led to major changes in healthcare delivery and spending. 

In this week’s episode of A Health Podyssey, Alan Weil invites Sherry Glied, dean of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, to the program. They take a step back from the main findings from the paper and discuss the relationship between administrative costs and the high costs of healthcare prices. 

Listen to Sherry Glied share why she thinks value-based care won’t be transformational and how public health is a desirable field to choose a career in now.

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