“SHOW ME THE MONEY!!” This is not exactly what health tech companies said to Chris Klomp (head of Medicare) at an event this week, but it is what Cuba Gooding Jr. and Tom Cruise yell at each other in the movie Jerry Maguire. The 1996 film is about trying to transform the greed-based culture of sports agents into a more caring, personal relationship with the professional athletes they represent. I think this movie will help us get our minds around our healthcare system’s public policy inflection point – the one where we try to shift the culture from expensive sick care to incentivizing personalized health through preventive measures – discussed a bit more below in the One Thoughtful Paragraph.
Some news from this week that is less focused on money (but all of this news will cost money in the end):
- The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission released a 20-page strategy with 128 recommendations about how to combat childhood chronic disease, including a real-world data platform linking claims information, EHRs, and wearables data to track chronic disease trends.
- With the threat of a government shutdown hanging in the balance, the U.S. House of Representatives is pushing for a formal conference with the Senate to get to a budget deal before the September 30th deadline. We noticed that the House Appropriations Committee added a provision to the HHS budget bill designed to block the new CMMI model, WISeR, from subjecting some traditional Medicare services to a prior authorization process.
- The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) published a new standard for developers and health systems to validate predictive AI tools, including information about data training and algorithm explainability.
“If anybody else wants to come with me, this moment will be the ground floor of something real and fun and inspiring and true in this godforsaken business and we will do it together!” When I had the privilege of talking with Chris Klomp at CTA’s Health AI+ conference this week, I heard him sorta say this line that Tom Cruise delivers (in that earnest Tom Cruise way) in the movie Jerry Maguire. This Chris Klomp guy is Jerry Maguire-ish. He wants to transform a broken, traditional system into something really different. It is pretty unusual to have a Medicare Director say to a crowd full of people who could, and probably do, teach a class on the history of Medicare payment policy, that he is going to create a new payment mechanism that will “incentivize quality improvement and cost reductions in contrast to the current time-based or volume-based incentive methods.” And he’s going to do it with technology to make things faster, simpler, and leverage personalized digital health tools to make people stay healthier, all by focusing on “data liquidity” so we all have the information we need. Oh, and he’s aggressively seeking the help of the private sector. Interestingly, the movie Jerry Maguire was based on a memo written by then-Chairman of Walt Disney Studios, Jeffrey Katzenberg, that called for Disney to return to its core values and focus on storytelling rather than blockbuster spectacle. Right? The guy in charge of blockbuster spectacles suggested going back to not-blockbuster storytelling. In his tech entrepreneur, open-minded way, Chris Klomp seems to be suggesting that healthcare should get back into the business of keeping people healthy. Listening to Chris Klomp talk makes me feel like “Dorothy” in the movie when she reacts to Jerry Maguire’s declaration that his new business model “is going to change everything.” And she says: “Promise?”
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If you want to learn more about what Chris Klomp and other healthcare leaders said at CTA’s Health AI+ conference, please send us a note to perri.cooper@maverickhealthpolicy.com to sign up for our MyMaverick subscription service.
