Why Your Healthcare Vendors Need to Guarantee You At Least 2X Returns (Using 5th-Grade Math) with Lee Lewis

Lee Lewis is Chief Strategy Officer at the Health Transformation Alliance (HTA), a coalition of 60 large, household name employers. The HTA is responsible for around 5 million employees, spends close to $30 billion dollars on healthcare annually, and is entirely owned by its employers. Lee was previously a consultant at Gallagher and ran a large employer practice and innovation lab. 

Lee is a nationally-renowned healthcare expert who sheds light on his rigorous yet simple process of sorting through 330 solutions across 86 categories.

Listen to discover the importance of holding employee healthcare to the same standards as other business units, why sharing knowledge to solve different problems is necessary, and why benefits professionals should be incentivized to take risks and rewarded for delivering results. Learn why diversity of thought is important in the context of benefits management to improve ROI and create better solution providers. 

"So everything's coming back together. It's like the big bang and the big shrink, where we exploded into a universe of many different complexities, and now it's starting to regather. It could be that in another 5-10 years, they all collapse together to create another big plan that's all in one, and then perhaps the cycle begins."  

"If you're just comparing participants in your program to non-participants, that is not good math. That is called volunteer sampling bias, and by using that mechanism, I can make any program look good even if it does nothing. I just have to find the people who are willing to raise their hand and say, "Yeah, I want to try something new," and follow those people around for a few months. These individuals, who at any given point in time are willing to raise their hands and volunteer to try something new, are going to have a differentiated impact, and it has nothing to do with my program."

"Every CFO in the land will not do an acquisition unless they think there is about a 4x return on that capital investment. We, within benefits, need to hold ourselves accountable to the same rigorous financial measures undertaken by other areas of our businesses. We owe that to ourselves, our professionalism, and our ability to have a seat at the table with the CFO and substantiate the ROI and plan management in which we engage."

"If we ever want to transform care, we need to catch up with the other leaders in the world. Who are the top leaders? The Michael Phelps of healthcare globally are Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong."

"If I have to hire an actuary to see what your ROI is, I'm not interested. Plus, minus, multiply, and divide, that's it. We want good, concrete numbers."   

"I have to take 2-3 phone calls from different vendors in one space to get really good at that space. And I listen to vendors not to judge them, but I study what a vendor does well enough so that I can explain it back to them as well as if I worked for their firm. That requires me to take really good notes during vendor calls. I'm taking relentless notes, and I am saving those notes to get good within a category." 

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