ORLANDO, Florida—For all the industry’s talk about disruptors overhauling the current healthcare ecosystem, major retail and primary care players are adamant that their success depends on playing nice with traditional care delivery organizations.
Speaking at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Global Conference in Orlando, Florida, One Medical Chief Network Officer John Singerling said his company makes a point to “digitally and clinically” integrate with a major health system partner in each of its active markets. Doing so allows the company to expand its service offerings beyond primary care, he said, linking patients to specialists, lab services or even acute care in a way that is relatively seamless to the consumer.
“We have phlebotomy, which is the most beloved service that we offer. You can drop in anywhere at any of our offices and get your blood drawn; it’s seamless, a great experience,” he said during a conference panel. “But we have no ancillaries and no specialists. So for longitudinal care, we have to link in with the leading health systems to be able to do that. So our built-for-purpose technologies link in with electronic health records (EHRs) and health systems across the country, so we spend a lot of time with intentional design on access in for things that we don’t offer in the primary care realm.”
The sentiment was shared by Best Buy’s vice president of virtual care offering management Jaydeo Kinikar.
The retail electronics company’s main health business—fall detection pendants and other in-home devices that link to an on-call service center in case of emergency—is a valuable tool for families with seniors in need of safety surveillance, but it’s no substitute for traditional at-home assistance or hospital-based acute care, he said.
“For us, it’s very simple and straightforward. We’re not competing with systems and providers and payers,” Kinikar said. “We are not in the business of delivering community care.”
Best Buy’s Lively brand and services were in place prior to the pandemic, but, over the past couple of years, the retailer began to field requests from various health systems asking whether the company could help them deliver “the last mile of care,” Kinikar said. This interest has since led Best Buy to make new investments in the remote care space as it pursues new partnerships with systems, in-home assistance organizations and other providers.
“[Providers] realize that care is shifting to [the] home, but that care model and the distribution model is not established to really drive some of this virtual care, [these] new models of chronic care,” he said. “This is where we decided to expand our presence in virtual care and acquired [remote patient monitoring company] Current Health last year.”
Rani Kheterpal, head of value-based care partnerships at CVS Health, acknowledged that her company already has almost unparalleled access to health consumers thanks to its brick-and-mortar retail pharmacies. Still, its plans to expand its ecosystem and reach—particularly in regard to value-based care and health equity—will require innovative, collaborative relationships with providers and other so-called disruptors.
“My title includes partnerships, right? I’m head of value-based care partnerships because as ginormous as CVS is, we know we can’t do it alone,” Kheterpal said. “My job is to find those partners that can enable this next era of healthcare that we’re all working to build.”
Underpinning the executives’ appetite for collaboration was a shared belief that there’s plenty of room for growth in the current healthcare system.
Singerling, for instance, said that One Medical has “yet to find a market in America” with sufficient primary care and primary care access.
“The reality is that although some people [see us] in some respect as a competitor, we don’t see that at all,” he said. “There’s plenty of demand in this market to deliver modernized primary care and to do that in partnership with others. That’s our model … we think partnerships matter, and they’re all going to lead to the benefit of the people that we’re fortunate to serve.”