AEE12: Steve Blumberg and I Discuss the 2020 Humana Value-based Care Report

I had a vision for this inbetweenisode. I wanted to highlight the wisdom of our amazing guests this year. I really wanted to find some theme that might be a key to our health care transformation. To achieve maximum suspense, here’s the very short story of how I got from “Is there a common thread of wisdom throughout all the RHV episodes this year?” to “Why, yes, there is … and it’s a good one!”

So, let’s start our journey of discovery with this. Here’s a fact: If you talk to patients, they will often tell you that they receive poor care or their needs are not met—when they fall between different providers, or their payer and their provider and their PBM (pharmacy benefit manager) are singing off of different sheets of music.

For more information, go to aventriahealth.com.  

When not hosting the show, Stacey is co-president of Aventria Health Group, a marketing agency and consultancy. Aventria specHumana recently came out with their Value-based Care Report. The subhead is Physician Progress and Patient Outcomes. It’s a very fancy report with a lot of pages and graphics, and this impressive format definitely caught the attention of some of our industry. I read one blog post really keying in on one sort of depressing aspect of the report, namely, that Humana’s value-based care (VBC) program saved a rounding error of 0.4% over their non-VBC program.

I wanted to get an expert’s take on this report and the reaction to the report and could think of no better person than Steve Blumberg, who has worked in value-based care delivery on the provider and on the payer side.

Steve Blumberg, MBA, is the VP of practice transformation for GuideWell Health, a subsidiary of GuideWell.

This Humana report, if you’d like to see it for yourself, can be found at digital.humana.com/VBCReport. 

You can learn more at guidewell.com.

Steven Blumberg serves as vice president, practice transformation, for GuideWell Health. In this role, he is responsible for developing and implementing strategies for the further establishment of a high-quality, economically effective clinical system across Florida. He also provides guidance on value-based care and population health models.

Prior to joining GuideWell in June 2019, Blumberg served as vice president for value-based care at Baptist Health South Florida, where he led the strategy and implementation for Baptist’s population health and value-based care efforts. Prior to that, he was senior vice president and executive director of AtlantiCare Health Solutions, the New Jersey division of the Geisinger Health System, where he was responsib