Amid all the reimbursement and diversification strategies insurers are adopting in response to health reform, the Regence parent company is betting on its employees to nurture a portfolio of health technologies and services.
In 2011, the Regence Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans in Oregon, Washington, Utah and Idaho reorganized into the holding company Cambia Health Solutions, split between insurance and "direct health solutions," a portfolio of 23 different companies offering everything from health savings account apps to senior living sensor monitors to administrative software to concierge care -- many of them launching amid declines in healthcare premium revenue since the Great Recession. Of a similar diversification strategy UnitedHealth Group, Aetna and others are taking, Cambia's portfolio lincludes some far reaches into markets like elder care, and its executives, many Regence and Blue veterans, are looking for longterm growth and impact from the startups.
"What we're trying in the company is a marriage between the assets that really matter at the point of care, rather than a traditional product development process where the sales and marketing team meets with customers that figure out what products need to be in the marketplace and then craft them, and at the end of the process you get the buy-in," said Richard Popiel, MD, Cambia's chief medical officer and executive vice president of services, who joined the company last year after a decade with Horizon Blue Cross in New Jersey.
Going back before the reorganization into Cambia (a word that means rings on a tree, a nod to Regence's historic logging industry membership), executives encouraged staff to develop ideas they had and then, more recently, to commercialize them beyond just their own health plans, provider networks and membership.
"We're trying to instill innovation in our company," Popiel said, "because who better than the front line folks in the company experiencing what customers experience day in and day out to come up with solutions?"
One of those that evolved from an internal product into a new company is HealthSparq, a comparison shopping web software developed by several employees, including Brodie Dychinco, now strategy vice president, based on data analysis work he was doing for Regence plans in late 2000s.
At first, it was a web service for members, letting them search for doctors, hospitals and treatments based on quality, estimate costs and submit reviews. "That recipe got a lot of attention," Dychinco said. "I was giving away a lot of free consulting to other health plans for a couple of years."
Cambia's CEO Mark Ganz asked him, "Wouldn't it be great, at the end of your free consulting, you say 'Not only can I help you with this, but we actually have a solution that we can implement'?"
A year ago he and others at Cambia consolidated those web services into HealthSparq, which is now used by 19 health plans covering every state, he said.
Among the other companies in Cambia's portfolio are TriZetto, the maker of administrative software; CoPatient, which lets patients audit and appeal medical bills; Sprig Health, a discount direct-pay online service in Portland, OR, for patients to book everything from naturopath visits to X-rays; and Qliance, a concierge primary care service in greater Seattle that got started with venture capital from Amazon's Jeff Bezos, among others, and in addition to being available for subscription, is available in the network of a Centene health plan sold in Washington's health insurance exchange.
While all of those and other Cambia companies are designed to be payer- and provider-agnostic, with "their own market imperative," Popiel said some have the potential to be blended into Regence's strategies.
With Qliance, he said, "We are working with them on how to integrate a concierge practice into a more traditional network of providers."
The latest company in Cambia's portfolio is Live!y, a maker of sensors marketed for seniors that learns their daily activities and lets caregivers monitor them remotely.
"It enables the 40- to 65-year-old generation concerned about aging parents or family members to put sensors in the home, on the refrigerator, on a utensil drawer, on a medicine cabinet," Popiel said. "It's not a camera, you don't feel spied on. But it gives the family members peace of mind that the activity levels in somebody living independently are still the level that they should be."