Evernorth brings the power of wonder and relentless innovation to create world class pharmacy care and benefit solutions. 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. Ever North home based care provides value based care that helps patients with multiple chronic conditions and social determinant of health barriers get the care they need and the personalized experience they deserve. We serve patients who struggle to navigate the health care system by bringing high quality primary
and preventative care services to the home. By providing clinical care and support services that provide whole person care, we improve health equity, access, and outcomes for the populations we serve. This is Gracelyn Keller with the Becker's Healthcare Podcast, and we are live at the 2024 payer issues roundtable. I'm currently joined by Pankari Sharma, who is the strategy and operations leader at Humana. So
thank you for being here today. We'd love to start our conversation by having you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about your role. Thanks, Grace. Happy to be here and, talking to you. I'm Pankari Sharma. I'm, like you said, the strategy and operations leader in Humana in their clinical strategy team. What my work scope includes is improving the health outcomes for our members through different initiatives, and that consequently also reduces
our total cost of care. So broad initiatives under that umbrella. Well, thank you for being here. And let's start our conversation today surrounding growth goals. So from improving member experience and expanding value based care to controlling costs, payer executives have ambitious growth goals for the rest of this year and looking ahead into 2025. In your role, what is your top priority, and how are you planning to get there?
Sure. So I would say, my priority is would, again, fit under that very broad umbrella of improving the member outcomes as well as, thinking through how to enhance member experience while doing so as well.
The 2 initiatives that are on top of my mind this year and would be early next year are, firstly, addressing the gaps in care for our members so that they can proactively be in charge of their health more, are able to have better access to the providers, to the services that would help them not worsen their chronic conditions. So that is one thing that's on top of my mind.
And the second thing is, providing better and more holistic population health services to our, members and especially the more vulnerable population. And going along with that, at an industry level, how would you describe the biggest barriers to effectively serving and engaging members? And what opportunities do you see for large scale improvements? And how are you applying this in your current strategy?
Yeah. I think the largest barrier that I see personally is the adoption of preventative care and especially when it comes to members and their mindsets. So I think as an industry, we all have, and by we, I mean, all the stakeholders, including payers and providers. We understand the value of preventative care in ensuring positive outcomes in a proactive manner. But, ensuring that members get that and they do not have reactive, but proactive mindset to getting,
preventative care. And we as stakeholders can facilitate that. So, ensuring that in terms of affordability, accessibility to providers, availability of providers, and, just building their trust in the health care industry overall so that they reach out to us as well when they need such help. I think that is one of the barriers or something that we should be working to improve upon. And shifting gears slightly toward leadership growth, keeping pace in today's dynamic health care landscape is
challenging. So what is a piece of advice you'd like to share for peer leaders to help grow their businesses while keeping members top of mind? Sure. I just had a panel on, harnessing AI and, dig digital health outcomes for improving member
health outcome plan. And I would probably I would just repeat the answer that I gave there, which was interoperability, in terms of, data is something I feel would not only help our members and our outreach to them, which would be more targeted, more timely, more customized to their needs, but also having that kind of interoperability would help peers and providers make our back end processes more efficient.
So I think that's a a bedrock for a lot of improvement in terms of how we, do decision making as well as implement our decisions. And as we wrap our conversation up, are there any closing remarks you'd like to share on the podcast today? It was great to be the part of this conference. It's it was great to see how different organizations and stakeholders have same things on mind. I think, AI was one,
element that we all are thinking about. We are making our efforts from our end, but also looking at the regulatory organizations as well. Got it. And, I'm leaving this conference very optimistic that in a couple of years, we would be way ahead of where we are right now. Wonderful. Well, thank you for taking the time to be here. Again, we are live at the 2024 Payer Issues Roundtable. Thank you for having me.