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the conference website. That's the beckers hospital review.com events page. See you in Chicago. Hello, everyone. This is Jacob Emerson with the Becker's Payer Issues podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in today where we're joined by Curative's CEO, Fred Turner. Fred, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us on the podcast today. Thanks for having me on.
So, Fred, before we dive into everything we wanna talk with you about and we wanna hear more about Curative, Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background within health care? Yes. I'm, British originally. Born and raised in the UK, but been out in the US for over 10 years now. Originally got started in health care in the in the lab industry, actually doing a high throughput STD testing and screening for antibiotic resistance, in STDs.
And then, that was my first startup company and, actually was was trying to get out of the lab industry and into, taking on risk in, in sepsis patients to try to improve outcomes. That was the very first version of Curative at the very beginning of 2020. Got sucked back into the lab world with, COVID 19 testing and helping scale up the COVID 19 testing efforts. And that was, what we call curative 1 point o, And then, obviously, now onto the the payer side with the curative health plan.
Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, some of our listeners might not be familiar with that transition journey. So can you talk to us a little bit more about that, the company more broadly? When did you get started? Can you explain the the transition from COVID testing company to a health insurer? And then who are you serving today? What kind of membership do you have, and what are the
markets that you're in? Yeah. Absolutely. So we actually when Curator was first founded in January of 2020, we were, as as I say, working on sepsis outcomes, and we had a pilot set up with a hospital in Wisconsin. And we're kind of excited to to try and move that forward. And we we managed to do it for over about 6 weeks until COVID hit and closed down, any external clinical trial partners at that hospital.
And so we thought, you know, maybe we can help with this testing thing for a few weeks until it all blows over. Obviously, it lasts a little longer than that. We ended up scaling the company from 7 to 7000 employees in the 1st 12 months. Ultimately, grew it to, to do about 10% of all US, PCR COVID tests. We operate across all 49 states, 3636,000,000 tests. We're everywhere apart from Hawaii. So it was a very sizable business, but, obviously, you know, it was a very
much a short term need. And we serve that short term need, but then recognize, you know, this is not a a long term need. And so even from the beginning of kind of 2021, we were focused on what comes next. And we looked at a a number of different things, you know, some stuff in the lab industry. We actually briefly looked at buying a hospital, kind of similar to what General Catalyst is is now doing, with their acquisition of a health system and kind of trying to infuse it with tech.
Ultimately decided not to do that and decided that there is a gap in the market in the commercial health plan space, where the other players are generally focused on Medicare or Medicaid and not really on actually trying to bring any innovation to the commercial health plan space, particularly on the fully insured side. So the curative health plan, it's a large group employers, 51 FTEs and up, that we serve.
Currently, we work with employers that are headquartered in either Texas, Florida, or Georgia. Fantastic. So it sounds like massive growth during the pandemic, then a switch to health insurance, within these last few years. Fred, you you you touched on, the the lack of innovation, as you say,
within the commercial insurance space. And as you know, this this industry is is very dominated by a few powerful players, really only a handful of, companies nationally, and it's a very highly regulated, a very difficult industry to enter in as
a new company. So talk to us a little bit about what you're telling employers, what you're telling individuals about why they should choose and and take a bet on Curative versus some of these more ingrained health plans that that probably offer, you know, much larger larger provider networks and things like that? Yeah. It really comes down to, do you want to invest in actually keeping your employees healthy and maintaining the health of your population and managing their cost long term?
Or you focused on, you know, putting up the deductible and getting a short term win when people skip all of their preventative visits, but having ever increasing health care costs long term and being hit with a 20% renewal every year. You know, and that's really what we're trying to fight with the curative health plan. So one of the the issues that we identified in the market is the rise of high deductible health plans, and the effect that that's having on
the care that members are seeking. You know, obviously, the idea with the high deductible plan is that a member will be an informed consumer, and they'll they'll go and shop for the best prices, and they'll only get high value care. Unfortunately, it it just doesn't really bear out in reality. And, generally, what happens is members actually just avoid, all care, including and especially preventative care. They skip
their colonoscopy. They skip their mammogram. They don't go get their checkup because you're charging them money to go do that. It's just one more excuse for them to avoid that engagement that you actually really want. And so an increase in cost sharing tends to save money in the 1st plan year because you don't get those claims for those preventative services. So you save a little bit of money in the 1st year, but by the 2nd year, you're already seeing that catch up with
you. What could have been a primary care visit is now an emergency room visit. You know, what could have been a specialist visit is now a week long hospital stay. And so you actually start to see your claims cost go back up again. And then, generally, by the 3rd year, claims cost will be actually above where they would have been if you hadn't put that cost sharing in place. The problem is 3 years is kind of
a long time horizon. So you get to end of 3 years, and employers say, what did we do last time our health care costs increased? Oh, we put up the deductibles. And that worked last time, so we should do that again. And you kinda get caught in this spiral of just passing more cost off onto members, driving, greater and greater patterns of care deferral, and getting the population basically sicker and sicker because you're not getting that engagement. You're not managing chronic conditions.
You know, you're not getting members into care at the appropriate time. You're waiting for something to go catastrophically wrong and then paying for the hospital claim. So we're trying to do that very differently with the curative plan. All members have no out of pocket cost for the first 120 days. And then during that 120 day window, they have to complete what we call a baseline visit. It's a mix of an onboarding to the health plan with a preventative,
health visit. It's done with our staff. It takes about an hour. And as long as you complete that baseline visit, you continue to have no out of pocket cost for the whole plan year. So no deductibles, no co pays, no coinsurance, $0 out of pocket for any in network services. You can see your PCP. You can have a baby. You can get cancer care. It'll be $0. But if you don't do your baseline visit, on the 100 and 21st day, you will revert back to a $5,000 deductible and 20% coinsurance.
So it's a big $5,000 carrot and stick to actually engage just once a year in your own preventative health. And we find that is very effective at driving member engagement. We get about 98% of our members actually engage and complete that baseline visit. And that's really the first step in their journey to reengaging with the health care system and actually managing their health proactively.
And so through that, we're able to significantly reduce, those unnecessary and preventable hospital visits. We actually are running about 30% below a Milliman well managed benchmark in terms of inpatient admits and inpatient bed days. And all of that comes down to engaging members early, getting them into primary care, getting them to take their medications, all of the basic stuff that we know
works. But doing that scale across 98% of your population, you can actually keep people healthy and decrease your long term health care costs as an employer. Wow. I mean, that's fascinating to hear hear you take us through that in some of these numbers you're seeing, especially around the the baseline visits. I imagine no co pays, no coinsurance, no deductibles is is very enticing, to to many employers. So fascinating to hear
about, Fred. And and how many total members are you at now with the company? We're at about 55,000 members now. Wow. Amazing. So you you just announced an expansion into Georgia in August. What's the strategy behind that? Why are you going into Georgia, and and where are you operating right now? Yeah. So right now, the majority of the business is in Texas. That was our first market. We launched in Florida at the beginning
of this year. So we are now starting to see some really good traction, in Florida and seeing a lot of growth out of that market. For us, you know, we we want to be a national payer. We want to, you know, eventually be across all 50 states. Obviously, we wanna grow at a responsible pace. And so, you know, it's gonna it's gonna take us some time to be, to be national, but it's really for us focusing on where our employer is headquartered. We already have members across all 50 states.
You know, we have members everywhere, who work for employers that are headquartered out of Texas or Florida. So for us, Georgia was the the logical next step where, you know, there are a lot of employers based there. And for us, the speed to, to launch was, was relatively quick. Sort of a similar regulatory framework to what we see in Texas and Florida.
Sure. Absolutely. And are are you finding that employers are coming to you, wanting to offer health benefits for the first time, or are a majority coming to you, having a traditional health plan with some of these big players and and wanting to reduce their costs? What's kind of the shake up there? Yeah. Most of the time, we're replacing, like, a Blue Cross or United, right, a Bruker plan that they're currently offering. Understood. Makes sense. Alrighty, Fred. Well, what
else are we missing? You you have the ears of a lot of health plan executives from all over the country right now. So any final thoughts or or bits of advice you'd wanna offer before we go today? I think, you know, one of the the biggest things is people need to be willing to to try something new if we wanna
get a different result. Yeah. This is one of the biggest things we face with employers is they are upset when the deductibles keep increasing and they get a 20% rate increase every year, but they're not willing to do something different. Right? If you I think Einstein's definition of insanity, right, was doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. If we want to change the outcome, we have to be willing to change what we're doing. Fantastic.
Fred, thanks so much for taking the time to sit down with us, and for sharing your insights with our listeners. We truly appreciate it. Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. If you'd like to listen to more podcasts from Becker's Healthcare, you can visit beckershospitalreview.com.