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  Payers who want to affect the change needed to revamp the healthcare delivery system will need to forge closer relationships with providers, be engaged more with members to help them manage their health, and create better alignment with the government said three health plan executives Thursday at AHIP Institute 2012 in Salt Lake City.  

To observers and stakeholders alike, "innovation" may be the watchword that best sums up the mindset across much of the healthcare sector these days. One place where that innovation is beginning to take place is in the new partnerships being formed between providers and payers..

As more individuals, as opposed to group employers who might bring with them hundreds of employees, enter the insurance market in search of individual policies, health plans are going to have to figure out how to sell to them.

On Wednesday, at the AHIP Institute 2012 in Salt Lake City, Rick Solano, president and CEO of Mirixa, moderated a workshop entitled "Medication Therapy Management: The Next Phase in Managing Chronic Disease."  The session delved into many aspects of MTM and Solano recently took a few moments to discuss MTM and its role in improving the care of people with chronic illness.

There is no shortage of uncertainty when it comes to the implementation of the state health insurance exchanges (HIX) by 2014, as required under the Affordable Care Act. Regardless of the snail's pace of guidance from HHS on key aspects of the HIX or even if the individual mandate is deemed unconstitutional, health plans should be making state-by-state analyses of how they will participate in these new marketplaces.

ICD-10 proponents are not going to like this one bit.

BancTec, which specializes in financial business process outsourcing, transaction automation and document management, has acquired certain assets of Richardson, Texas-based GTESS, a provider of claims pre-adjudication technology and services for the healthcare industry.

While AHIP Institute's session programming takes on most of the major and timely topics of the industry both in its general sessions and concurrent sessions, it also provides attendees who are early risers with highly focused information during its Networking Breakfasts program.

With technology playing a bigger and bigger role both in how healthcare is delivered to populations as well as where it is delivered, AHIP Institute 2012 will present a general session at 10 a.m. Thursday called "Brave New World of Health Care: At the Intersection of Science, Technology, and Delivery System Transformation" to help attendees better understand how emerging technologies are transforming the face of the industry.

Around 3,000 executives from the health insurance sector and related industries will converge beginning Wednesday in Salt Lake City for AHIP Institute 2012. This year's event is sure to be lively considering the impending Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act and the upcoming presidential election.