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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 Recker with the Becker's Payer Podcast, and we are recording live at the Becker's third annual spring payer issues roundtable. Today, I am joined by Harlan Pickett, president of EqualCare Health Solutions. Harlan, thank you so much for joining me
today. Can you go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself and your background? Absolutely. It's my pleasure to be here. Great event. I've really enjoyed it. I have been in the insurance and health care world for about eighteen years. Started Eagle Care back in 2019. We provide alternative solutions for employers to help control their health care spend and to provide better access to health care. These are customized plans, nothing off the shelf.
It actually gives the employer control over what their health plan looks like instead of once in, you know, a one size fits all. That that's that's not effective in today's environment. It doesn't allow you to control cost in any way, shape, or form, and it certainly doesn't provide the access to health care that your employees deserve.
Well, I'd like to start this conversation off by asking you what you and your team at Eagle Care Health Solutions does to ensure that the quality of care is kept at the forefront. Now that that is it's paramount. First of all, if you don't know cost and you don't know quality, there's no way you can understand what value is. There's a lot of talk about value based care right now. But in this health care system, it's almost impossible to know what the cost
is first. Well, if you don't know the cost and you don't know the quality, how do you know it's valuable? How do you put a value to it? So we work diligently on that side of it. One of the major ways we do it is we do direct contracts with physicians that have shown outstanding outcomes and that actually care about their clients, so much so that it is a membership based model that is a monthly per member per month, and then any additional cost that would be incurred at that facility is zero.
So it's just a monthly membership. There's no co pays. There's no out of pocket, and, therefore, any cost that happened there never are attributed to the plan. The plan doesn't have to pay anything. The employer doesn't have to pay anything. It's just that one monthly fee. This aligns the incentives for the patient and the physician and it rebuilds that relationship as well.
Therefore, the patient and the physician working together with one goal and that is an improved quality of life and improved health for the patient. That's where you get the quality. Absolutely. You know, I'd like to keep that conversation going about quality. So improving quality and advancing health equity while also reducing cost seems to be a big priority for everyone in health care. So how do you approach aligning these priorities in your
organization's strategic vision? Yeah. Imagine that the reason that you can't see a doctor is because I don't know how much it cost. We removed that barrier. So health equity in many cases is because folks cannot afford to go or they don't even know if they can afford to go, and there maybe isn't a location close to them.
So doing these direct direct contracts, having a direct contract with a physician that's gonna give this individual not five to seven minutes, which is the national average, but is gonna provide them forty five minutes to an hour to focus just on them, have a conversation, not just about their health but about their lifestyle choices, It changes their life for a positive way. It brings them back into a relationship with a physician that they heard tell about, but it hasn't been available for
so many years. It levels the playing field. This is a level of service that in most folks say, oh, you're talking about an executive concierge. No. No. We're not talking about an executive concierge. We're talking about a physician who is really invested in your health and invested so much so they wanna have a relationship. Most of our members don't just have an app that they work through to talk to their physician. They actually have their physician's phone number.
They can text their physician. They can call their physician if something's going on. We've had the physician come and meet people on New Year's Eve whenever the baby was turning blue. What do I do? This would normally be an ER visit. It turned out it it although it sounds really serious, it turns out it was a very simple thing that the doctor was able to take care of. Those folks felt so much better.
Obviously, the baby felt so much better, but they've never stopped talking about how important it was to them to have that relationship and have that opportunity to do that. Well, can you imagine what it was like when they went back to work to talk about their experience? All of a sudden, in that particular employer group, we started seeing even greater participation,
even greater engagement than there was before. Sometimes all it takes is one isolated incident to make something just explode, and all of a sudden the uptake on it is incredible. Absolutely. That's amazing. And I'd like to keep the conversation going with HealthEquity, as you mentioned earlier. Can you share an overview of a key initiative here that you're involved in or particularly excited about, and what are you hoping to achieve? Yeah. There's there's obviously certain communities.
And I won't just get into inner city. I mean, that's that's pretty well known, but we're talking about rural destinations right now. There's been a lot of talk at this conference about how do we affect change in rural areas to provide them access to. We're actually it it it's a pretty pretty new thing.
It it became an opportunity for us. We're investing in a couple of physicians' offices that are in rural areas to help them change away from a fee for service to this membership based model because that then that generates your income today. What many rural positions cannot do is wait through the payment cycle. That payment cycle eats them up.
Even if they are seeing a decent number, if you're spread across multiple health plans and you're continually waiting for that money to come in, they're already understaffed a lot of times, especially in rural areas. All of a sudden, now they can't afford to even keep the people on. It's hard for them to keep their practice going.
A change in model then is an acceptable way to keep your practice going to help grow that practice because that that's what our our mission is going to be, is to bring then local employers even in those rural areas to show them, hey. Here's a here's a model that will work better, and now your folks can have this relationship again. The other thing we're doing is providing them technology so that they can do televisits.
Many of them don't have that type of infrastructure in their practice, but we're bringing that technology to them so that they can provide that too. That helps expand their practice within their state. Amazing. Well, this has been such a fascinating conversation. Again, this is Haley Rucker with the Becker's Payer Podcast recorded live at the Becker's third annual spring payer issues roundtable. Harlan, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been my honor
and my pleasure. Thank you so much,