Scalability is the end goal of nearly every tech start-up, systems innovation, and teenager you-tubing their cat — it’s going viral, business-style. And traditionally, it’s been seen as a marker of relevance and success. Growth is good, right?
But in health care systems transformation, do we lose something meaningful when we measure the value of our work by its national impact?
Take Iora Health, a new health care venture out of Massachusetts that contracts with large companies and insurance plans to provide care for employees or insured patients. Iora clinics have a for-profit model and are seeking to capitalize on saving money. They charge companies and insurance plans monthly fees and in turn endeavor to keep their patients out of hospitals and emergency rooms, the most expensive places to receive care. If they successfully prevent costly services, and save their company or insurance plan money, they take a percentage of those savings as profit.
The Iora model is essentially beefed up the primary care services offered in the comfort of a patient’s community, sometimes even as convenient as a local shopping center. They argue that by providing health coaches, lower doctor-to-patient ratios, around-the-clock availability, excellent customer service, and unlimited visits per patients, they can effectively manage most chronic illness before it progresses and requires hospitalization or emergency services. Now, nothing they are offering is particularly new, as primary care practices across the country are considering or implementing similar strategies. But what is intriguing, is their plan for growth.
As the New York Times recently wrote, Iora’s “ultimate goal is hundreds of practices across the country, a kind of Starbucks for health care.” And as their CEO Dr. Rushika Fernandopulle stated, “Building one good practice is mildly interesting, because a few people have done that. But how do you scale that across the country? That’s much harder.”
Hard, yes. But meaningful, I’m not so sure.
See, Iora’s foundation is venture capital, and their business model aims to create a revenue stream providing services most clinics cannot afford; because most financial incentives in health care favor hospital and emergency visits. On the surface, it’s a win for doctors because many physicians want to provide comprehensive care, and it’s a win for patients, because Iora is paying to provide a care experience consumers want. But what about low-income populations? They lose here.
To maintain the for-profit status that supports their model, Iora Health purposefully doesn’t take patients off the street, the uninsured, or the unemployed for that matter, I guess unless some unemployed individuals are buying insurance with a plan they contract with. And yet, Iora says their model is going to “transform health care” and scale across the U.S.
When 5.5 percent of the population is unemployed and more than 1 in 7 live below the poverty line, how is this model “transforming” the system for everyone? The truth is, it’s not.
So I return to my initial question, do we lose something meaningful when we measure the value of our work by its national impact?
In Iora’s case, as with many clever and highly specialized health systems innovations, I think we do. Iora’s business model is what drives their innovation, but it is also what makes their services irrelevant in populations that don’t qualify or need their comprehensive care. It doesn’t make what they are doing any less valuable, but it does mean they may not find significance with every population. In addition, since their model excludes populations already under-served by the health care system, their national dissemination may actually threaten access to care for low-income families.
Health care is a complicated enterprise where the needs of the consumer are variable and evolve over time. That diversity of need and resource distribution defines the challenge in our current system. And in the end, that variability may be too complex for a one-size-fits-all, Starbucks model.
Perhaps health care doesn’t need cookie cutter solutions imposed on populations with distinct assets and needs. Perhaps just like politics, all health care transformation is local and finds meaning in its local application, not its national prominence.
We all know ideas with traction and those that find their way to a national stage are exciting. But I think there is something to be said for offering a unique service to a distinct population, and doing that well for the long-term. So instead of looking for the next big thing, the actual big thing is made up of small things that are changing the way each of us experience our health care.
Rhea Boyd is a pediatrician who blogs at rhea, md. and can be reached on Twitter @RheaBoydMD.
