Peering Inside Home Health and VBC with Clinician, Investor, Operator and Public Servant, Dr. Julian Harris

Dr. Julian Harris developed a personal passion for home health
and shifting care towards value watching his father and his
grandfather serve as caregivers for his mother and grandmother,
who both had complex health conditions. He started his
professional life as a primary care doctor in community health
centers and safety net hospitals, but with an interest in
business, gravitated towards a career that has spanned the
highest levels of provider, payer, government and many other
organizations. He is now applying his knowledge and experience
towards his passion for care at home, serving as chairman and CEO
at ConcertoCare, a value-based provider of at-home, comprehensive
care for seniors and other adults with unmet health and social
needs.

In addition to his role leading ConcertoCare, Dr. Harris is also
an operating partner at the healthcare investment firm, Deerfield
Management, and earlier in his career served as an advisor to
Google Ventures (GV). He also led the healthcare team in the
White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and before
that, served as the chief executive for the Massachusetts
Medicaid program. Most recently, before joining Deerfield, Dr.
Harris worked at Cigna, where he led U.S. Strategic Operations
and internal investment in technology and innovation, and then
served as President of CareAllies, a group of Cigna-affiliated
population health management and home-based primary care
companies.

In this episode of Healthcare is Hard, Keith Figlioli’s
conversation with Dr. Harris covers a wide array of topics
related to healthcare innovation and new care delivery,
including:



The levers of shifting care towards value. Drawing on
his perspectives from clinical, innovation and policy roles (at
both the federal and state level), Dr. Harris describes how he
thinks about the different levers that can be adjusted to
improve quality while ensuring that healthcare is affordable.
He talks about the main goal of incentivizing providers to
practice evidence-based medicine and adjusting key levers
including the number of people covered, level of benefits,
negotiated rates with providers, and utilization, and how they
all impact each other.


The VBC journey for each category of home care. Dr.
Harris discusses the broad range of services delivered in the
home – from PT and OT, to infusion services, palliative care,
hospice, and even home-based primary care. He talks about how
organizations focused on individual components of home care are
finding their way towards value, how Medicare and Medicaid are
driving the movement, and the end goal of combining all the
pieces for comprehensive care.


Thoughtful acceleration of digital tools. While there
are many barriers for aging patients to engage with digital
tools, Dr. Harris is seeing thoughtful and effective execution
by companies addressing issues like remote patient monitoring,
medication adherence, and chronic condition management. He sees
the most success with patients utilizing these tools in an
integrated model and talks about the increasing role digital
tools will naturally play as people engage more as they age, or
before they develop complex health conditions.



To hear Dr. Harris and Keith talk about these topics and more,
listen to this episode of Healthcare is Hard: A Podcast for
Insiders.