Bill Akers, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Premera Blue Cross, joined the Employee Benefits Planning Association’s (EBPA) CEO Roundtable to discuss the latest trends in healthcare, the future of the industry and market performance. We caught up with him to learn more about how Premera and the industry are evolving.
What do you see as the main challenges and opportunities for Premera in the coming years?
For me, the biggest challenge and opportunity are one in the same. It is about re-orienting healthcare more broadly back to the people it’s meant to serve. This means increasing access to affordable, quality care.
Healthcare is complicated, complex and slow to change. That is always the biggest obstacle and as a health plan, we need to be on the same side of the table as our provider partners. When we are able to do this, we have the biggest opportunity to make healthcare work better. Two key examples of how we’re working to make this happen include our new HMO and our partnership with Kinwell Medical Group.
Our new HMO, which launches next year, will provide our members with a coordinated care health plan at an affordable price. Our partnership with Kinwell addresses the growing primary care crisis. Kinwell is building clinics all around Washington that are exclusive for our members, which will improve access to high-quality primary care.
While the pandemic dominated our minds over the past couple of years, we have also been confronted with the reality of racial inequities. What is Premera doing to address inequities in healthcare?
The color of your skin or the ZIP code you’re from shouldn’t determine the quality of care you receive, your ability to access care or determine your life expectancy. But in the United States, that’s what’s happening.
At Premera, we are tackling health equity from two different fronts. Working with our community partners to address health inequities has always been a key pillar of our Social Impact program.
We also implemented a corporate Health Equity strategy in 2021. For the first phase of our strategy, we are focused on increasing equitable access for Black Washingtonians, Alaska Natives, and rural customers in both states to improve their behavioral health and hypertension health outcomes.
By 2033, the United States will be looking at a shortage of up to 139,000 physicians, 55,000 of which will be in primary care alone, according to a report by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). What is Premera doing to help address the primary care crisis?
The primary care shortage is deeply concerning when we think about our communities and their ability to access care when they need it. We’re taking a short- and long-term approach to this crisis. To address this problem now, we’re working closely with our provider partners and thinking outside of the box.
Our partnership with Kinwell Medical Group is a perfect example of this. They are opening primary care clinics across Washington that are exclusive for our members, which will reduce wait times and improve access and care for our members.
Kinwell is also integrating behavioral health into their clinics, which will also help to address the limited access to mental health services. Increasing capacity for rural family medicine residencies remains important in our long-term efforts to improve healthcare for the more than one million people living in Washington’s rural areas.
Two of our key investments have been to support Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences’ rural family medicine educational pathway and help the University of Washington establish the Rural Nursing Health Initiative to place current students in rural practices in Washington state.
