When Jaewon Ryu, MD, looks at the state of health care in the U.S., he believes it is too hospital-centric.
While hospitals always will be important for patient care, Dr. Ryu believes there is an opportunity to shift the health care delivery system upstream.
“People, despite our best efforts, will always have very serious conditions that they need to be in hospitals for," said Dr. Ryu, CEO of the nonprofit organization, Risant Health, and former president and CEO of Geisinger. “But we know that it's even better if you can identify things sooner, if you could prevent clinical conditions altogether, or if you can get ahead of problems and manage them in different settings."
That preventive approach is essential to what is known as value-based care. And Risant Health is a nonprofit organization launched by Kaiser Foundation Hospitals that aims to expand and accelerate the adoption of value-based care.
Geisinger, a 100-plus-year-old health system that serves 1.2 million people in urban and rural communities in Pennsylvania, became a part of Risant Health in early 2024. Geisinger is a member of the AMA Health System Program, which provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine.
Dr. Ryu talked about Risant Health's expansion and the benefits of value-based care in a recent episode of “AMA Update.”
Benefits of value-based care
“Value-based care is a transformation from how most people think about health care,” Dr. Ryu said. “It has always been when something is wrong with a person, they contact their physician or a specialist to try and take care of the issue.”
But value-based care attempts to alleviate the issue before it becomes a problem.
“It's a deviation from where many health systems, and frankly the rest of the industry, has been," he said. "We want to make sure that the delivery system is able to get involved further upstream, whether it's focusing on prevention, primary care, the clinic environment, the home, the virtual sphere or social issues that we know impact the health of communities.
"Think of it almost like managing the total health of a population as opposed to simply seeing [people] episodically when things flare up," Dr. Ryu added.
Risant Health provides new support
To kickstart that transformation, Risant Health set out to identify nonprofit, community-based health systems with similar missions. Geisinger was the first system identified, and the transaction was announced in the spring of 2023.
The system went through the regulatory approval process and was formally acquired in April 2024. With the acquisition, Dr. Ryu transitioned from president and CEO of Geisinger to CEO of Risant Health. His position may have changed, and the transaction is now official, but the work Geisinger was already doing will continue.
“There's actually a fair amount that stays the same," Dr. Ryu said. For example, “things like the name, the mission, the ability to partner … with other health plans. Continuing down the journey of building out these capabilities to transform how care is delivered, that doesn't change either."
What does change is the support Geisinger now has at its disposal, he said. Geisinger can now leverage capital, technology and resources to accelerate its transformation toward patient-centered innovation.
If all goes according to plan, Geisinger will not be Risant Health's only system for long. In June 2024, Risant Health announced a definitive agreement to have Cone Health, a North Carolina-based nonprofit health care network, as the second health system to become part of Risant Health. The transaction is pending regulatory approval.
Dr. Ryu said the hope is to identify another three or four health systems to become a part of Risant Health by 2028. These systems, like Geisinger, will continue to operate independently as regional or community-based health systems, serving their communities' needs. Along the way, the health systems have access to Risant Health's value-based platform, along with industry knowledge, resources, and support.
“We want to see systems that are walking the talk, rather than simply talking the talk," Dr. Ryu said. "This is not a rescue mission. This is about taking great organizations and making them even greater—being able to put them on turbo boost to accelerate what they're trying to do, especially on that movement toward value-based care."
Learn more with the AMA about value-based care, including ways to improve data sharing and best practices for payment methods.
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