Sep 26, 2019
In this health care podcast, I speak with Lee Lewis, who is the newly minted chief strategy officer at the Health Transformation Alliance, otherwise known as the HTA. The HTA is a group of 50 major corporations that have come together in an alliance to do one thing: fix our broken health care system.
Anyone who knows Lee knows he knows a lot about how to improve health care benefits for large employers. He’s pretty much the perfect guy to be the chief strategic officer at the HTA. The most amazing thing that I always find about improving health care, the structure of health care benefits, and health care benefits for an employer is that it’s like having your cake and eating it, too. On one hand, both the employer and the employee save money. On the other hand, employees get better care and they spend less time away from work struggling to navigate the health care jungle all by themselves.
Lee has a playbook for improving the structure of health care benefits or health care benefits for large employers, and this playbook consists of three chapters, which we get into in this podcast. The first chapter covers the “how” of health benefits, including what Lee calls the “administrative superstructure.” The second chapter in Lee’s playbook is the “what,” which usually comprises drug spend and then, on the medical side, how care is delivered for specific clinical conditions like musculoskeletal, cardiometabolic, etc. There are a few conditions that tend to rack up the most costs categorically, and those are the ones that Lee focuses on. The last chapter in Lee’s playbook is the “who,” meaning where employees are steered to for care—and that also includes an emphasis on PCPs (primary care providers).
Lee Lewis is an innovator and strategist helping large, national, self-funded employers save millions on health care through leading practices, vendor partnerships, and member engagement. He pioneers methods around the convergence of digital health, medical consumerism, biomedical supercomputing, and system reengineering.