Optum, as we all know, is a sprawling behemoth with business units providing everything from pharmacy benefit management (PBM) to actually providing primary care. Optum Ventures is Optum’s innovation center as well as its strategic hedge. Just in case the PBM business takes a turn. Today I speak with A.G. Breitenstein, partner at Optum Ventures. […]

There was great hope for consumerism. By pushing the burden onto patients/employees to find high-quality care at a fair price, we assumed that health care delivery would level up. But anyone seeking to validate this hypothesis would be pretty hard pressed to claim any sort of broad-stroke success beyond cost shifting by brute force. It […]

Over the summer, Amazon purchased PillPack for $753 million. And I had to say I felt a little bit like I should get into the investment business. Back in 2015, I interviewed TJ Parker on the show, mainly because I was so taken by the way PillPack manages multiple prescription medications for customers by presorting, […]

Today, Dave Dierk, my co-president at Aventria Health Group, and I talk about the pharmaceutical industry and its ability to collaborate with so-called “large organized customer groups.” “Large organized customers,” by the way, is pharmaceutical code for integrated delivery networks (IDNs), or pretty much any large health care stakeholder. Also in the conversation, “our clients” […]

Eighty-five percent of patient visits happen in the non-acute space. What happens if you don’t provide high-quality services at these non-acute care sites? Patient leakage, for one, which can cost up to something like a million dollars a year to a health system. Another problem with poor quality is poor quality metrics and also patient […]