When Kaiser Permanente CEO Greg Adams thinks about the tall task of advancing value-based care throughout the country, he harkens back to an idea often mentioned by his organization’s founder — Henry Kaiser, the famed industrialist who played a major role in establishing the country’s modern healthcare system.
“One of the things that Henry Kaiser used to say is that the only way to truly know your future is to create it,” Adams said Sunday afternoon during an on-stage interview at HLTH in Las Vegas.
In other words, achieving value-based care at scale across the nation is a feat that requires bold action.
Kaiser took a bold step last April when it announced the launch of Risant Health.
Risant is a Kaiser-owned company designed to acquire and operate nonprofit health systems under value-based care models. For its first acquisition, Risant bought Geisinger, a Pennsylvania-based health system comprising 10 hospitals and a health plan with more than half a million members.
At the time of the launch, Kaiser said it expected to invest $5 billion in Risant and fold five or six health systems into the company over the next five years. A year and a half later, the organization still has strong faith in this novel model of scaling profitable value-based care, Adams declared.
The Geisinger deal was finalized in April. Risant’s second acquisition target was announced just two months later — Risant is to buy Cone Health, a North Carolina-based health system with five hospitals and an insurance arm. The deal is still subject to regulatory approval.
Kaiser isn’t showing any signs of slowing down when it comes to the Risant experiment. The organization is currently talking to new acquisition targets, Adams said.
As one would expect, he declined to name which health systems Kaiser is talking to — but he did describe the characteristics that Risant needs to see in any potential acquisition targets. First and foremost is a strong commitment to value-based care.
“One of the things that I’ve learned as we’ve embarked on this journey is that there are many community health systems across the nation that have been on the journey of becoming a value-based organization, many of them for decades — and yet they are challenged to maintain that commitment, and they’re challenged to achieve scale. That’s where we come in,” Adams remarked.
He pointed out that Risant is not meant to be a savior that swoops in to save cash-strapped health systems.
“We’re looking for organizations that can be financially sound on their own,” Adams added.
He also noted that Risant should not be thought of as Kaiser in disguise. When a health system gets acquired by Risant, it continues to operate independently and maintain its brand, Adams noted.
Kaiser isn’t necessarily looking to stamp its name all over the place — instead, the organization’s focus is on spreading its integrated care model as widely as it can, he explained.
Adams noted that Kaiser has long been regarded as a health system at the forefront of innovation. He pointed out that it was among the first to scale the use of electronic medical records, dive deep into value-based care, establish integrated financing and delivery models and create health equity programs.
“It is only fitting that we are the first to step out and say, ‘We can evolve, we can innovate. We can bring the secret sauce of KP to community health systems, and we can change healthcare in this country,’” Adams declared.
He also said that Risant-owned health systems should expect to improve their cost structure by 2-3%.
“Part of it is what the value base platform does — we’re estimating that to be about 60% of the cost reduction. The other 40% is related to our enterprise and what we’re able to do in terms of shared services,” Adams explained.
Geisinger has officially been a part of Risant for only about six months — and the health system is already approaching a 1% improvement to its cost structure, he added.
It’s much too early to label Risant Health as a smashing success or a failed project. In Adams’ view, the main takeaway from the company’s early days is this: it’s time to think about healthcare in this country as an “evidence-based systematic process” rather than a fragmented collection of fee-for-service episodes.
Photo: primeimages, Getty Images
