Insider Susan DeVore on Reducing Waste and the Path to Alternative Payments in Healthcare

Susan DeVore has been in and around the healthcare industry for
most of her life – long before she became president and CEO of
Premier Inc., a company that unites an alliance of more than
4,000 hospitals and health systems and approximately 165,000
other providers and organizations to transform healthcare.

It’s a little-known fact that Susan’s roots at Premier date back
to her childhood when her father, a biomedical engineer, worked
for a predecessor to the company. After working at Ernst &
Young – including time as a partner and senior healthcare
industry management practice leader, among other roles – she got
the call to interview at Premier.

No one was aware of Susan’s company legacy at that time, but
after she joined, there were longtime employees who remembered
her attending the company picnic or other gatherings as a young
teenager.

Susan’s lifelong focus on improving the healthcare system and her
current role at Premier – driven by insight from such a vast
network of care delivery organizations – combine to give her an
incredibly valuable perspective for solving healthcare’s biggest
challenges. Premier’s network enables it to maintain a dataset
that encompasses roughly 45% of patients in the US. Those data
inform Susan’s leadership and the decisions the company makes to
help solve cost and quality challenges and develop a unique model
of care delivery.

At the HIMSS Global Conference & Exhibition in February Susan
will be delivering a keynote session titled, “Healing from
Within: Leading Change, Inspiring Action.” But you can hear her
first on this episode of Healthcare is Hard: A Podcast for
Insiders. Susan’s conversation with Keith Figlioli covers a
number of pressing topics including:


 Reducing Waste in the System – Susan talks about
how there’s still 30% waste in the system and three times
unwanted variation in care delivery, and how these challenges
can’t be solved by insurance companies or the government. She
believes the only way to tackle them is head-on, from within the
system, and shares her thoughts about how data, technology, and
influence within healthcare systems are all critical to driving
transformation.

 Changing the Social System – the decades-old
social system that the healthcare industry is built upon is one
that’s difficult to change. But it’s starting to change in
experimental ways, driven by innovators and early adopters who
recognize that it’s unsustainable for healthcare costs to grow at
twice the rate of the economy, and who want to do something about
it. Susan talks about how and why it’s easy to stay in a
fee-for-service world and shares her thoughts on the main
barriers to change.

 The Path to Alternative Payments – as Susan sees
it, the big thing that’s holding health systems back from
adopting alternative payment models is uncertainty. If providers
that haven’t adopted or are only experimenting in alternative
payments think there’s a chance that fee-for-service might last
longer, it’s much harder for them to make the leap. However, she
talks about her view of federal regulations and how the “training
wheels are coming off” to force change more quickly.


 The Next Big Thing: Making Big Data Small – while
increasing access to healthcare data is playing an important
role in transforming the industry, one big challenge right now
is the sheer volume of data that exists. Susan talks about how
the next big thing on the horizon will be figuring out ways to
make vast amounts of data more usable. She talks about how to
get “small data” into the workflow so it’s available for
physicians and patients to use in making informed decisions
that change the care being delivered.




To hear Susan DeVore talk about these topics and more, listen to
this episode of Healthcare is Hard: