Solera Health is committed to changing people’s lives. Through its platform, it provides intensive, evidence-based, lifestyle and behavioral social interventions to impact the most prevalent and costly chronic conditions experienced by patients across the United States.
Dr. Byron Crowe is the company’s Chief Medical Officer. In this interview, he talks about the growth of digital tools and platforms which are now making up the healthcare ecosystem, and the benefits and challenges this has brought.
“We now have these new, innovative tools that can really make a difference in people's health,” he says. “But there's a big problem, which is there's a lot of them. And historically payers and employers have had to go one by one, signing individual contracts, doing individual data integrations, and then having internal teams that had to manage all of this.”
Dr. Crowe goes on to explain how, through Solera, payers are able to integrate and consolidate what can be complex technology stacks.
Listen in to the full conversation to find out more.
Rebecca Willumson:
Hi there. I'm Rebecca Willumson. I'm the publisher of Fierce Healthcare, and I'm here today with Dr. Byron Crowe, Chief Medical Officer, Solera Health. Dr. Crowe, thanks so much for joining me.
Dr. Byron Crowe:
Thanks so much for having me.
Rebecca Willumson:
Before we kick off, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your role at Solera?
Dr. Byron Crowe:
Yeah, of course. I'm a practicing internist by training. I practice out in Boston and serve a faculty role, and then most of my time is spent at Solera Health. I'm serving the Chief Medical Officer role, so supervising our clinical team responsible for our clinical quality outcomes and the way we design our clinical programs.
Rebecca Willumson:
So Byron, your panel today is centered around the pressures payers are facing. From the employer's perspective, what do you think is one of the most challenging requirements facing employers and payers in their evolving coverage models and what's so health doing about that?
Dr. Byron Crowe:
A huge challenge for payers and employers is managing the digital health point solution ecosystem. We've had a preponderance of digital health solutions over the last decade. It's been really great in many ways for patients. We now have these new, innovative tools that can really make a difference in people's health. But there's a big problem, which is there's a lot of them. And historically payers and employers have had to go one by one, signing individual contracts, doing individual data integrations, and then having internal teams that had to manage all of this. Not only is that pretty challenging to do, it's a lot of people hours, it's expensive. It requires a lot of ongoing maintenance in terms of having teams that keep their eye on the ball, make sure everything's working right, and it ultimately doesn't scale. So for an organization, they can only do so much with the resources they have before they're not able to manage 15, 20, 30 point solutions anymore.
So this problem has emerged of how do you do all this in a way that's efficient, effective, and can scale? Because ultimately we want to use these solutions. We want more, not less. We want to know which ones work. So we need transparency about outcomes, and we want to do it in a way that doesn't bankrupt our organizations. Right. If you're a company with 50,000 employees and you have 10 point solutions, that can easily overwhelm a small team or require you to spend a lot more than you would want to on hiring a bigger team. So who's going to do that for you? Who's going to help the payers do this? Who's going to help the employers do this? That's where Solera comes in. With our Halo technology platform, we're able to host point solutions, both our own curated network of solutions, as well as non-contracted point solutions that a payer or employer might have that we don't have a contract with, but they might have an existing contract with. Bring them all into one place, the Solera platform, and then integrate at various levels. So we get to see the outcomes of each program and then have really great conversations with our payer partners, with our employer partners about what's working, what can we do better, and start to iterate and continue to learn as this ecosystem evolves.
Rebecca Willumson:
So tell me, what do you need from a payer partner to really make that relationship work?
Dr. Byron Crowe:
The most important thing we need from a payer partner, we need a willingness to collaborate and a willingness to integrate with us. So when you sign on for our platform, we can just at the baseline, we're already doing a lot to help the payer. We're able to take point solutions, bring them onto the platform, spin up our own networks, and then start getting these tools in front of their members. So right there, we have a big win. On top of that, our platform allows payers to configure their benefits ecosystem at the employer level. So it's been really hard for payers to try and manage employers who want their own specific custom solutions and own specific network. Our platform makes that really easy for payers to do so just signing on for the platform, you're already getting a ton of benefit. But for our partners who really can work with us even more, collaborate with us even more, integrate with us even more, make us part of the infrastructure share even more data, we can start to do things that really push the envelope about what's possible in digital health as far as risk prediction, integration with care management, utilization management pathways, integration with other parts of the benefits ecosystem, integration with in-person care delivery models.
The more we can work together and the more we can integrate our technology with their technology and their workflows, the more possibilities we unlock. So we're really excited when we have payer partners and we have many who choose to really lean into this with us.
Rebecca Willumson:
That's great. Well, that feels like a great place to end. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Dr. Byron Crowe:
Yeah, thank you. It's my pleasure.