San Diego Business Journal Features Healthplace America
June 08, 2009
As published in the San Diego Business JournalReform a Hot Topic at Health Insurance Conference
By Heather Chambers
San Diego Business Journal Staff
Lowering the cost of health care and the possible effects of reform dominated discussions last week at a three-day event hosted by the health insurance industry’s biggest lobbyist.
America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade organization of 1,300 members that provide health insurance coverage for more than 200 million Americans, drew an estimated 3,000 people to the San Diego Convention Center for its annual meeting June 3-5.
San Diego-based Anvita Health, formerly SafeMed, was among dozens of health care technology companies with a display at the conference hoping to capitalize on the need for more cost-efficient and personalized medical treatment.
At a time when medical costs have come under the microscope, Anvita says it is helping lead the way for more informed decision-making among doctors and health insurers.
“Clearly, what the (president’s) administration is doing and the groundwork they’re putting in place today is going to push for vast amounts of data,” said Anvita CEO Richard Noffsinger. “All of these activities are just going to build on an already huge amount.”
Using Anvita’s engine, physicians can upload a patient’s detailed health profile and determine whether the drugs they prescribe might cause harmful interactions, whether costly imaging procedures could be avoided or whether co-existing conditions require treatment. It estimates it can save $250 a person annually, and has been shown to influence doctors to cancel imaging orders about 9 percent of the time.
The health care analytics company caught the attention of Google last year, which licensed its software to power Google Health, a free online repository of health information that allows users to import their medical records, share medical information among family members or doctors and browse various health care offerings.
Insurers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts have also signed on, hoping to identify gaps in care to avoid bigger expenses down the line, according to Anvita.
“In analyzing their large population, we analyze millions of lives in minutes,” Noffsinger said.
Small Companies Could Benefit
A push for bigger health care savings could also benefit small companies specializing in add-ons to employer-sponsored health plans, such as Illinois-based Healthplace America. The 4-year-old company came to the conference seeking clients interested in its network of surgeons who offer fixed-rate pricing for knee and hip replacements and other surgical procedures.
Healthplace contracts locally with Surgery One, which operates surgical centers in Carlsbad, Chula Vista, La Jolla and San Diego. In January, Healthplace changed its business model from accommodating U.S. medical travelers to helping coordinate their care domestically.
“When we learned that U.S. providers could compete with international pricing based on our model it was apparent to us there’s no reason to leave the country for care,” said Richard Marra Jr., executive vice president of Healthplace America.
The industry meeting also sparked debates among health care providers, lawmakers and industry officials about the necessary elements of health care reform.
“We are weakening our economic position in the world because our costs are going up so much higher than everyone else’s,” said Howard Dean, the former Democratic Party chairman who has turned his attention toward reforming the nation’s health care system, during a panel discussion alongside former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and John Kitzhaber, a medical educator and two-term Oregon governor.
Bush told the audience that the debate over reform seems to be focused on access rather than care.
“That in itself won’t solve the problem that we spend more than two times the GDP than any other country in the world,” he said.
The conference drew protests from a group of advocates, including the California Nurses Association opposed to AHIP’s solutions for health reform. During the governor’s debate, advocates of a single-payer health plan presented an $11 billion check symbolizing their annual profits as a symbolic payout to encourage health insurers to leave the industry so that government-sponsored health care might emerge.
Reform Proposals
A day earlier, AHIP executives stressed the need for cost-cutting in the health care system with a series of policy reform proposals it is pushing in Washington, D.C.
The industry is calling for a 30 percent reduction in growth over five years, which it estimates can save $500 billion in health care costs at the current rate. It calls for the creation of a public-private advisory group to recommend policies to Congress on cutting costs, an “essential benefits plan” to accommodate people who want to travel across state lines for care, universal coverage and the adoption of uniform standards for quality, reporting and information technology.
“We’re really trying to draw attention to the implications of cost containment as an economic issue, as a moral issue and as a fiscal issue,” said Mike Taffin, executive vice president of AHIP.
