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Our connected health services make the treatment, prediction, and prevention of health care's most complex conditions easier and more accessible as we drive organizations and people forward. This is Haley Reitker with the Becker's Payer Podcast. And today, we are recording live at the Becker's third annual spring payer issues roundtable. Today, I am joined by Eric Cannon, who is the chief pharmacy officer at SelectHealth. Hello, Eric. Thank you so much for having
this discussion with me today. Can you go ahead and introduce yourself and share a little bit about your background? Yeah. You bet. Thank you, for having me. It's great to be here. I'm a pharmacist by background and training. I've spent, twenty eight years now with SelectHealth and love every minute of it. It's great being part of the Intermountain system and being able to do the right thing for our clients and our patients. Well, thank you so much for that brief introduction.
Now to get things started, balancing affordability and quality is a constant challenge for health plans. How is your organization innovating to manage the cost of care while maintaining or improving member outcomes? You know, taking care of our members and ensuring they have access to quality care is our top priority. It's one of our major commitments, and it guides just about everything we do.
Our philosophy has always been if if we do the right thing for our patients and our members from a clinical standpoint, the cost will follow or we will see cost efficiency. As the cost of therapies becomes more and more expensive, maintaining that position is becoming more and more difficult. What we know though is we've demonstrated that through quality care, we can improve
patient outcomes. We can improve cost. That doesn't always mean we adopt the most expensive or the latest therapy, but what it does mean is we follow the evidence, and that drives great outcomes for our patients. Well, I'd love to dive deeper into that with the quality of care. So in an ever evolving regulatory landscape, what best practices or tools does your organization rely on to keep quality of care at the forefront?
You know, twenty seven years ago, we established our own PBM, Scripius, and we did that because we didn't see any what we believe to be ethical options in the market. We built Scripius to provide greater transparency. We share data. We run all our own operations. We own our own contracts. So our clients know exactly what they're going to pay, for a prescription drug.
This has given us a solid framework to build the organization on, and it puts us in a situation where we're consistently doing the right thing for our members. I I think as you look at regulation, as that regulatory environment continues to evolve, evolve may not be the right word. It may be forced upon us. Yeah. But many of those changes that we're seeing proposed today, those are things that
we already do as an organization. So we continue to work with regulators and legislators as they draft and develop policy. We believe through greater transparency, that's the right way for us to evolve the market and go forward. Thank you so much for sharing. Cost transparency is so, so important, especially in today. I'd like to pivot the conversation a little bit. So net promoter score is a powerful indicator of member loyalty and satisfaction.
How are you using NPS to drive meaningful improvements across your health plan? You know, NPS has become such a part of what we do. We're constantly trying to leverage that so that we can enhance and provide a better overall experience for our members. As we've followed Net Promoter Score, one of the things we found is that the single biggest dissatisfier for our members is they don't like being surprised when they get to the pharmacy. And and let me give you a great example.
With our Medicare membership, every year, they get a transition fill. Well, when people would get a transition fill, we would send out a typical CMS standard letter to say, you just got a transition fill. But people didn't fully understand that. They didn't know exactly what they were supposed to do. They took the letter to their doctor. The doctor didn't know what they were supposed to do. So we've started following those up with a personal phone call to each one of
those members. They were gonna call us anyway. So we reach out to the member. We explain, hey. You just got a transition, Phil. Here's what you need to do. Here are the different options, and here's the process, and we're happy to help you walk through that. Had we not been focused on NPS, we would not have really had that opportunity to improve that single process for those Medicare members.
Alright. And finally, looking ahead, what do you see as the biggest opportunity for payers to lead the charge in transforming care delivery and driving better outcomes for all stakeholders? And how can leaders take a step in this direction now? Pushing for greater transparency within the various facets of health care, I think, remains one of those essential opportunities.
The more we can increase visibility into costs and policies and decision making processes, stakeholders can come together and facilitate a more equitable and informed environment for all of us to take care of the patients. As we take steps in those directions, I think as leaders, we need to be fostering collaboration, and and that's fostering collaboration with people maybe we haven't typically
interacted with. That's sitting down with the administrators of the hospitals and really looking at billing practices. And how do we make sure patients go to the optimal side of care and not the cheapest side of care? How do we work together on all of that? I think as we continue to increase that level of transparency, we continue to demystify health care, and we make it better for everybody. Well, Eric, thank you so much for joining
me today. Again, this is Haley Recker with the Becker's Payer Podcast recorded live at the Becker's third annual spring payer issuers roundtable. Eric, have a great rest of your day. Hey. Thank you.