“EP219: How to Deliver Population Health in the Real World (and Get Paid for It), With Arshad Rahim, MD, MBA, FACP, of Mount Sinai Health System”
by Stacey Richter

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EP219: How to Deliver Population Health in the Real World (and Get Paid for It), With Arshad Rahim, MD, MBA, FACP, of Mount Sinai Health System
March 14, 2019

Population health is a great idea, but success depends less on great ideas and more on great implementation. Today I speak with Arshad Rahim, MD, MBA, FACP. Dr. Rahim is senior medical director of population health at Mount Sinai and a wealth of information on what it takes to successfully implement a population health initiative and manage to get paid for it IRL (in real life).

Arshad Rahim, MD, MBA, FACP, is a practicing physician and a health economist at his core. He enjoys a track record of building innovative health care businesses, including Mount Sinai Health Partners, Healthgrades, and Sg2. As the senior medical director for population health at Mount Sinai Health System, Dr. Rahim is responsible for driving physician performance for 3000 physicians within the Mount Sinai Clinically Integrated Network, focusing on key utilization, cost, and quality metrics. Dr. Rahim has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Duke University, an MD from the University of North Carolina, and an MBA from Emory University. He completed his internal medicine residency at Yale University and Northwestern University and is an actively practicing hospitalist at the Mount Sinai Hospital.

01:14 The most important aspect of population health that you really have to get right.
01:53 Having great ideas with terrible execution.
02:35 “In pop health … you gotta make sure that you [have] your A and B players … at the front.”
02:56 “For your core processes, you gotta make sure the people aspect is right.”
03:14 “Anything transformative is probably going to be 3 times harder.”
06:24 Measuring and setting metrics.
08:37 “The clock is always on.”
09:51 “Excellent due diligence in technology is … not as common as it should be from the purchaser.”
11:01 Making population health sustainable.
16:03 “It’s a very rational choice to just … focus on a fee-for-service model.”
19:48 Negotiating a population health management contract that enables health organizations.
21:36 “Most of them don’t have all the answers.”
22:31 “You also want to make sure that the rules don’t change on you as you start to get better.”
24:20 “It just makes sense … the devil is in the details.”
24:52 The importance of financial integration.
27:13 “If you really get down to it, no one disagrees with the change in care delivery.”