Privia Health empowers physicians by giving them tools, technology, and talent
Steven Loeb speaks with Parth Mehrotra, President and Chief Operating Officer at Privia Health, a company that empowers physicians by giving them tools, technology, and talent.
Our overall goal is to understand how technology is radically changing healthcare: the way we screentreat and measure progress and outcomes. How we’re empowering the consumer. Whether we’re creating productivity that drives economic costs down? And how tech advancements change the role of the doctor.
Highlights from the interview:
- Privia was founded on thesis that there was a need to establish an integrated care delivery model focused on ambulatory providers in the community. The company wanted to focus on gatekeeper providers in the communities that were the first point of contact, such as pediatricians, OBGYNs, and primary care doctors and then organize medical groups around those gatekeeper providers at a very large scale.
- Mehrotra has family that lives in Canada, in the United Kingdom, and then in India: so, three very different healthcare ecosystems, three very different payer communities and reimbursement models. The one thing common across all three of them is that these gatekeeper providers are the focal point and the centerpiece of care delivery. They can direct care, they have the best relationship with the patient, and they can influence where the patient goes.
- The utopia of solving the four biggest problems in healthcare, creating low cost, high quality, unlimited access, and very high provider satisfaction to provide care, may or may not exist. It's very hard to maximize those four variables. In almost every country, if you study the healthcare ecosystem, there are trade offs to be made across those four. The number of issue is how to make those right trade offs for certain subsets of the population.
- To really move the needle for a large portion of the population in a particular geography, whoever the payer might be, you need scale to impact healthcare costs with big dollars. That is very important to Privia's thesis: they are not interested in building smaller groups in any particular state, but they want to be one of the largest independent medical groups in any geography.
- Doctors go to medical school to learn how to take care of people; they don't go to medical school to figure out a technology stack, healthcare economics, actuarial sciences, dealing with payers, and running the business of physician practice. It's a big reason why they choose to sell their practice or get employed and get consolidated, then they're really dissatisfied being owned by a corporate entity. Privia interacts with the payers of healthcare on one end, and then it enables these providers in the communities to really take care of these patients and try and create a win-win, no matter what the reimbursement model might be.
- You cannot have a single track model and an approach because penetration varies, the density of dual eligibility varies, unit costs pricing varies between different states. So, Privia is focused on different strategies in each state as those elements evolve over time. In Virginia, for example, where MA penetration is about 10 or 12%, Privia is focused on commercial value-based and working with CMS on one of the largest MSSP ACOs. In Florida and Texas, where there's higher MA penetration, it does Medicare Advantage really well. You need to run different plays in different geographies and have a flexible model to tackle value-based care.
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Steven Loeb
