UHealth Care Lab Hosts Medicaid Innovation Conference

As start-up companies develop new models for health care delivery, Florida’s academic medical centers can play a key role in supporting innovation in the state’s Medicaid program, according to Richard J. Bookman, Ph.D., co-director of the UHealth Care Lab at the University of Miami Health System.

State Medicaid Director Beth Kidder at the UHealth Care Lab event.

“We know how to design and conduct scientific experiments,” Bookman said at a Medicaid stakeholders conference on March 5 at the Miller School of Medicine’s Gordon Center for Research in Medical Education. “We can be both the source of innovations as well as platforms for validating innovations to see if they can improve outcomes for our Medicaid population on a local, state and national level.”

More than 75 participants attended the “Healthcare Innovation in the Medicaid Space” conference, which featured a dialogue with State Medicaid Director Beth Kidder, who is also deputy secretary, Division of Medicaid, Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) in Tallahassee.

Kidder emphasized the need for innovation in Medicaid to better manage the health care needs of the 4 million children, parents, aged and disabled people served by the program. About 85 percent of Florida’s Medicaid population receives services through a managed care delivery system. “We welcome initiatives like this to bring fresh ideas and approaches to challenging problems,” she said.

Kidder said AHCA’s goals include increasing the percentage of enrollees receiving services in the community instead of a nursing facility, improving birth outcomes, and reducing potentially preventable emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and re-hospitalizations.

As a strategic forum for stimulating innovation, the conference included presentations from seven health tech start-up companies along with panels and discussions with national Medicaid experts and academic medical center leaders from UM, Florida International University, Florida Atlantic University, the University of Florida and the University of South Florida.

Miller School participants included Edward Abraham, M.D., executive vice president for health affairs, CEO of UHealth, and dean and chief academic officer of the Miller School of Medicine, and David Lubarsky, M.D., M.B.A., chief medical and system integration officer and professor and chair of anesthesiology. Representing Miami Business School were John A. Quelch, dean and professor of marketing, Steve Ullmann, Ph.D., chair of health sector management and policy, and Karoline Mortensen, Ph.D., associate professor of health sector management and policy. Carlos Migoya, CEO of Jackson Health System, also attended the conference.

Miami Business School Dean John A. Quelch addresses the conference.

The event was hosted by the UHealth Care Lab, a UHealth resource that focuses on innovations in care delivery. Co-sponsors included StartupBootCamp/Miami, The California Healthcare Foundation, UInnovation, and the UM Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI).

“Our goal is to build a statewide coalition to design a Medicaid innovation program for Florida and then to advocate for this program in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C.,” said Bookman, who is also senior advisor for program development and science policy at the Miller School and vice president for program development at the Florida Medical Schools Quality Network.

Other goals include supporting innovation in Medicaid’s Region 11 (Miami-Dade and Monroe) to address local challenges and encourage other communities in Florida to do likewise. For example, Bookman suggested a monthly session on Medicaid innovation at the Venture Café at the Cambridge Innovation Center in the Miami Health District.

After discussing segmentation of consumer markets in general, Dean Quelch said, “When we look at innovation in health care, we see it following the money and not the need. And that is one of the reasons I was so pleased to participate today — to put the focus on the Medicaid population … and to make sure that there is enough innovative effort targeted on this end of the spectrum.”

Sarah Mutinsky, founding senior advisor of Eyman Associates, said the nation’s Medicaid program is ripe for innovation in areas such as payment models, consumer-directed care, prescription drugs, and mental and behavioral health. She said there is a “window of opportunity” for developing new approaches opened up by the Trump administration and the new leadership at federal health agencies.

Bookman added that the conference was timely for several reasons, including the entrance of technology giants Apple, Amazon and Google into health care, growing interest from venture capitalists, and a dramatic increase in health care start-ups.

One example is FRND Health, an up-and-coming national company that hires nurses on their off days to make house calls for a provider organization’s patients. “FRND offers home care for patients, a cost-effective service for providers, all while allowing off-duty nurses to make extra income,” he said.

“We want to make sure that all this creative energy, all this entrepreneurial spirit, all these incredible technological advances, and venture capital are brought to bear for the benefit of some of the least fortunate in our society,” Bookman said. “We must deliver radically better care through scalable solutions that are culturally appropriate, foster deeper patient engagement, and are highly cost effective.”

Reflecting on the role of the state’s medical schools, Bookman asked, “Can we reinvent ourselves to be good innovation partners and move on to new models of knowledge creation? Can we invent new ways to put the tremendous intellectual capital that we have to use in the service of innovation? Can we re-wire care delivery in an academic medical center so as to serve as a platform for experiments in care delivery itself, not just a place to test a new therapeutic?

“I think we can, but it will not be an easy or comfortable process.”

For more information, or to get involved in the project, contact Bookman at [email protected].