Converge Cast | Leading with Purpose – a Conversation with Dr. Kate Goodrich
What does it take to transform healthcare from the inside out? In this episode of the WittKieffer Converge Cast, Charlie Fick, Senior Partner, and Lisa Mooney, Consultant, sit...
What does it take to transform healthcare from the inside out?
In this episode of the WittKieffer Converge Cast, Charlie Fick, Senior Partner, and Lisa Mooney, Consultant, sit down with Dr. Kate Goodrich, Chief Medical Officer at Humana, for a compelling conversation on leadership, innovation, and the future of healthcare. 
Dr. Goodrich shares her remarkable journey from hospitalist to federal policymaker to private-sector executive, revealing how each chapter shaped her mission to improve care for seniors and underserved populations. She reflects on the surprising moment she fell in love with health policy, the challenges of transitioning between public and private leadership roles, and the critical importance of quantifying value in a for-profit healthcare environment. Tune in to gain insight into how Humana is tackling the provider shortage, supporting dementia caregivers, and making value-based care a reality. Dr. Goodrich also offers candid advice for entrepreneurs hoping to partner with large healthcare organizations and ends on a hopeful note about what’s working in American healthcare today.
(Full transcript available below)
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Converge Cast Intro:
WittKieffer is the premier executive search and leadership advisory firm developing impactful leadership teams for organizations that improve quality of life.
We welcome you to the WittKieffer Converge Cast, where we bring together the brightest minds in healthcare, life sciences, and education.
Each episode, we invite experts, innovators, and voices from diverse backgrounds to share their insights and discuss the challenges that affect the health and well-being of our communities.
Together, we’ll navigate the complexities and discuss the tangible benefits and hurdles associated with the shift towards improved consumer experiences and better patient outcomes.
Lisa Mooney:
Welcome to the WittKieffer Converge Cast, where we bring today’s most influential executives from the quality-of-life ecosystem who have a unique vantage point on the forces and trends that are shaping healthcare and wellness in our communities.
We have two co-hosts today, myself Lisa Mooney, Consultant, and my colleague Charlie Fick, Senior Partner. We are both members of our Investor-Backed Healthcare Practice here at WittKieffer.
Our guest today is Dr. Kate Goodrich, who serves as the Chief Medical Officer for Humana, where she provides executive clinical leadership across both the insurance and CenterWell businesses.
Prior to her current role, Kate was Senior Vice President of Clinical Analytics and Trend, Clinical Solutions, where she developed the business insights and clinical programs designed to improve health outcomes at lower cost.
Prior to joining Humana, Kate held several leadership roles at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), including, she was the CMS Chief Medical Officer and Director of the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality.
Early in her career, Kate served on the faculty at the George Washington (GW) University School of Medicine and Health Sciences at GW, where she served as the Director of Hospital Medicine and chaired the Institutional Review Board.
Today, Kate continues to practice as a hospitalist and Clinical Professor of Medicine at GW.
Kate, having known you for a while now, one thing that’s always impressed me is how genuinely passionate you are about improving healthcare.
Whether it’s been in the public sector or now at Humana, you bring such a thoughtful and grounded perspective to everything you do. It’s great to have you with us here today.
Dr. Kate Goodrich:
Well, I’m really glad to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Lisa Mooney:
Our pleasure. So, you know, just to get started since you’ve had such a wide-ranging career and we touched on just a few highlights and intro your career has consistently centered around improving healthcare quality and outcomes at scale, whether in clinical practice, federal policy and actually now in the private sector.
So, to kick things off, can you tell us about your professional journey and decision making across these very different environments?
Dr. Kate Goodrich:
I’d be glad too. You know, as you noted, you kind of worked backwards. I’ll start from the beginning and work forward to give you a sense of how things evolved for me and what I was sort of thinking along the way.
Just to start though, the through line for me from the beginning really has been around improving outcomes, particularly for seniors, but also just the historically disadvantaged.
And that really is rooted in where I started, which was as a hospitalist at George Washington University, spent the first 10 years of my career there after residency, really just trying to be a good doctor.
I was sort of your classic clinician educator, really focused on training students and residents and ultimately advanced practice providers as well as PAs and nurse practitioners.
My patient population really was 80% patients who were on public insurance. So, either Medicare or Medicaid or combination is a dual eligible Medicare and Medicaid. So, very few commercially insured.
And so, this really meant that my population of patients often, you know, came from lower socioeconomic status areas of the Washington, DC area, often not very well educated, a very low health literacy, a lot of homelessness, a lot of mental health disorders combined with clinical medical disorders.
In fact, often those medical conditions were exacerbated by the fact that they had such profound behavioral health disorders.
And so, I’ve, I’ve got, I’ve felt a lot of purpose in treating those patients, but also it allowed me to really realize that our healthcare system doesn’t work for everybody and in particular those patients.
And over time, I became very interested in getting to some of the root causes of that.
And through some exposure to evidence based medicine and trying to, you know, understand what some of the big sort of healthcare system questions were out there.
I decided I wanted to go really learn how to do health services research to try to answer some of those questions or at least better understand how our health system works and how we kind of got where we are where so many are marginalized in our healthcare system.
And so, I left GW in 2008 to go do a fellowship through the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, which is now called the National Clinician Scholars Program.
I went to Yale for two years, really to focus on really what I thought was going to be to become sort of a rock star researcher.
It is a combined research and policy fellowship. And boy, I just really fell in love with the policy. I like the research. I’ve used my research skills ever since. But I really fell in love with the policy.
And so, I came back to Washington, DC in 2010, joined the federal government, starting off in the Department of Health and Human Services, a little office called ASPE, the assistant Secretary for Planning and evaluation, really focused on comparative effectiveness for search policy and policy around quality measurement.
And then moved over to CMS in 2011 where I really became an expert in quality measurement, quality improvement, all things quality.
My career did culminate as director of Center for Clinical Standards and Quality, as you mentioned, which is also the Chief Medical Officer role.
But frankly, that role is really all about, you know, implementing and scaling national programs to drive improvement for Medicare patients primarily.
So, I was really very squarely focused on improving care for seniors using all the levers that were available to Medicare, whether it’s measurement, public reporting of quality data, quality improvement coverage, decisions rooted in evidence.
And, and so that that was just an incredibly fulfilling time.
But you know, I’ve been in the federal government for 10 years and after 10 years, sometimes you’re ready for something new. And that’s really what it was for me.
I wanted to experience a different part of the healthcare ecosystem that I didn’t know very well, but I really wanted to maintain my focus on seniors.
But I wanted to see if in the private sector I knew there were different levers, perhaps more ability for agile innovation.
So, I came to Humana, which is a, you know, big healthcare company that is focused on seniors primarily. Although we do have a growing Medicaid business, it is a combination insurance and healthcare delivery business. So, a “pay-vider” if you will, really all focused on improving care for seniors.
And so, my role starting out was really focused on building the analytics infrastructure to identify ways to lower total cost of care through driving improvement in outcomes and quality for seniors.
And then when I transitioned into the Chief Medical Officer role here at Humana almost exactly three years ago now, continued that focus, but doing things in a little bit different way, really working across the enterprise.
So, both with the insurance side and with the CenterWell or care delivery side, that is so focused on seniors. So, it’s been a very rewarding career journey.
Charlie Fick:
I can only imagine. Kate, just echoing Lisa, thank you again for joining us today and thank you for also sharing your professional journey with us just now.
I’d love to circle back to a comment you made in talking about your professional journey and falling in love with policy.
And you almost used, if not accidental language, sort of a surprise that policy was something you became so enamored with.
And you’re talking to a policy, nut here. I’m a political science major. We could talk for hours about this.
But I, I’m curious, I feel like if more doctors, particularly earlier in their career had that exposure to policy, what could happen?
And I’m curious as somebody who did have that evolution and sort of fell in love with the policy angle, how do you think there might be ways that more early career physicians and clinicians can get that exposure and maybe find a, a career path like yours?
Dr. Kate Goodrich:
So, I get this question all the time and I love it because what I am definitely seeing as I’ve, you know, especially since I finished my fellowship and came to the federal government, is that there’s been, I think actually kind of an explosion of interest in doing exactly what you’re saying by young physicians and nurses and probably other healthcare professionals as well.
I get more every year. I feel like I get more and more outreach from clinicians who are earlier in their career, sometimes even medical school who have had some sort of exposure through medical school or through some other avenue to policy.
And they learn about people like me who are in this space and reach out and want to understand. How do I do what you did? Well, I did things a little differently. I actually entered policy about year 11 of my career. So, it wasn’t right off the bat, right. And so that is one path.
So, I give people advice in a variety of ways. First of all, there’s no, there isn’t one path for sure, But I do think you can start small. So, like what I did early on was I joined different committees of the professional organizations that I was a part of.
So, I’m a part of a society for hospital medicine and began a local chapter when I was still at GW.
And that meant bringing together hospitalists from across the DMV, as we call it. So, the DC, Maryland, Virginia area to just, you know, share our interests.
And turns out there were lots of aligned interests around how we make careers better for hospitalists, how we actually work with our capital administration to improve X, Y, or Z that we could share with one another.
So, and that may not, that’s not federal policy, but that is nonetheless policy inside a smaller ecosystem that at least gets you some of that experience about how you can drive change.
And so, I just give advice that, you know, start small. Often starting with your professional organization is an easy way to do it. It can be another organization that is based upon an interest that you have.
And then it’s also about building your network. And that’s not something you just do over a few months. You do it over a lifetime. And I think it’s another big piece of advice that I always give, you know, younger clinicians is start now. I mean, hey, now I’m part of your network, right?
That is a core piece of advice that I always give is constantly, constantly curate your network. Every job I’ve ever gotten is because of my network. That is just a fact. And most people like me that I talk to will tell you the same thing.
Lisa Mooney:
Speaking about policy, just switching gears here, a bit.
And as leaders think about managing their, managing the future, what regulatory trends do you foresee having the greatest impact on American healthcare over the next five to 10 years?
Dr. Kate Goodrich:
Well, that’s a big question.
Lisa Mooney:
It’s a big question, a very big question.
Charlie Fick:
Just a small little, you throw away one, you know,
Dr. Kate Goodrich:
And I’m going to try not to get political here. But five to 10 years means that it could span, you know, multiple administration. So, I’ll talk maybe about broader, you know, environmental trends that we see so that the big one is cost, right? And so, we have as it stands right at this moment in time, we have a big cost problem. I mean we’ve been saying this for years like we’ve had a big cost problem for a really long time, right?
But it is particularly concerning now because of the rising interest payments on the federal debt that are going to absolutely overtake everything else, right?
And so that’s why there’s so much pressure to look at the biggest areas of spend in the federal budget, which are healthcare and Social Security. And that’s always been true.
And so, and it’s just more true now than it was back in 1972, or whatever. I mean, so it is a, it is the area that that legislators have to look at to cut. Now, there are many ways to, to reduce spending there and there’s a lot of opinions about how to do that.
But the fact remains that that there is going to be over the next year to two years, to five to 10 years pressure on healthcare spending.
And so, there are going to be big changes in one way or another because there just has to be every administration that comes in is going to face this, right?
So, you know, for Medicare, there’s obviously a lot that’s been discussed around ways in which Medicare Advantage could be improved and that cost could be reduced. And that is undoubtedly true. The devil is in the details and how you go about doing that.
And there’s lots of proposals on the table, whether they’re like official proposals for a bill or just ideas that people have, but way that cost can be contained there.
I think the same is also true on the fee-for-service side.
And so, I think as somebody who lives in the Medicare Advantage space right now, you know, as, as you’ve probably seen from Humana, we’re, we’re thinking about these things, right? And I’m sure every, everybody in our industry is as well. So, I think there’s just going to be continued pressure on Medicare Advantage rates.
They’ll probably be continued pressure on, you know, risk adjustment and, and, and, and all that, you know, quality, the Stars program.
And so, we have to be, I think part of the team that is at the table helping to think through how to do this in a way it preserves or actually continues to improve upon, you know, the benefits that seniors are able to get, the quality of care that gets delivered.
We have a lot of evidence now that the quality of care is actually better in Medicare Advantage than in Medicare or fee-for-service through a lot of research that we, but also many others in academia have done here. But we also we have to do better on mitigating costs as well.
So, I think that is the biggest this trend that is just going to continue that at least I’ll, I’ll stop there. But there are others I could talk about, but I think that’s like there’s nothing that’s bigger than that right now.
Charlie Fick:
In the spirit of asking big questions that are difficult to answer, I’ll continue Lisa’s trend here. You know, speaking of trends that are looming and that are presenting societal challenges for us.
We also have the silver tsunami. We have a baby boomer generation that is growing larger and larger every single day. And we also have a provider shortage crisis that is getting worse and worse every single day.
And I realize I’m probably asking you an impossible question, but how do you and how do Humana think about tackling these sort of dual crises of more and more folks need more and more complex care with fewer and fewer providers to, to do that care?
Dr. Kate Goodrich:
It is a really difficult complex question, but I’ll at least give you my perspective on that. And I’m not saying I have the answer to solve it, because I don’t.
But I think if you, if you think about the root cause of why we have a provider shortage, I’m sure it’s not just one thing, but one of the big things has to do with payment, right?
So primary care is woefully and in my opinion, shamefully undervalued in the United States. We spend less than 5% of the healthcare dollar on primary care.
And there’s a good deal of evidence that in particular for seniors that more primary care is better, that the more primary care that seniors get, the less care they get in the hospital or in post-acute care or even in some specialty care that may or may not be necessary. Like some specialty care is absolutely necessary, like there’s just no question. But there is an overuse of specialty care as well.
So, I think that is just a key reform that is also needed in order to incentivize people to go into primary care.
I can’t tell you how often I run into medical students and residents who go into medicine because they want long lasting, long term, longitudinal relationships with their patients, usually delivered through primary care, right? Whether that’s family medicine, pediatrics, internal medicine, right?
But many of them change their minds and they go into something else because number one, they see how undervalued it is within often the institutions that they’re working in.
I’ll be honest with you, if that happened to me, I became a hospitalist in part because the hospitalist movement started when I was in residency and it was pretty exciting, but also because I saw how difficult primary care was, how undervalued it was. And this is back in the mid-90s, right? So, this has been going on a long time.
So, I think there needs to be real payment reform and, and there’s actually a lot of, I think momentum for that to change how primary care is reimbursed both at the federal level, it’s happening in some states as well, but it just, it needs to be valued more and paid differently.
So, it’s not just about increasing the actual reimbursement in the fee for service system, although I think some of that is no doubt required. It is also about changing the way in which primary care doctors are paid. So more prospective payments that allow primary care to invest in the resource that are needed to allow primary care doctors to deliver the best care. So that’s number one.
Number two is certainly use a better use of technology, although again, that goes back to payment reform to allow primary care to invest in technology. And what I mean by that is I’ll just give you one example of where I’m seeing that make a difference. So primary care doctors often have to see, you know, 25 to 30 patients a day. That’s like 10 to 15 minutes a patient, which is absurd, particularly when you’re talking about seniors who have lots of problems.
There are technologies that are starting to get used. The most well known is probably ambient AI, where it’s basically a technology that allows a doctor or an advanced practice provider to record the visit that is happening. The patient, doctor or provider, you know, visit right there, record it, and then it spits out a note in the correct format at the other end so the clinician doesn’t have to go then document 25 to 30 notes, you know, from scratch basically on their own, usually at home after hours, right and they do their billing and all that kind of stuff.
So that is a technology that we have piloted inside CenterWell, which is our care delivery business, our primary care delivery business and what we found is that it has significantly reduced documentation time.
It has allowed clinicians more time with their patients to be able to really genuinely hear them and get to know them and work through every problem that they have.
And it has we, we actually recently did a survey of our clinicians who are using this tool and they feel that it is definitely reducing their burnout.
And so, I think that is an example of a type of technology that can give time back to clinicians to spend with their patients, thereby making the experience of being a primary care provider more rewarding. And this is particularly necessary in the care of seniors.
So, I see payment reform and advancing technologies to improve clinical workflows and give people time back as at least two major things that need to happen in order to get at the problem that you are.
Charlie Fick:
Irony is that the greatest innovation that a doctor may need is just more time.
Dr. Kate Goodrich:
That is very well said. That is absolutely right. Yes, but there are technologies that are needed to allow them to have more time.
Charlie Fick:
Yes, yes.
Lisa Mooney:
Well, and as you’re talking too about payment reform and certainly value-based care has been one of those focuses and giving some of that time back.
When you’re thinking about value-based care as a strategic priority for many healthcare services companies, they often execution can often be a stumbling block though.
So, what are the most common pitfalls you’ve seen and what separates the organizations that seem to get it right and that help some of these providers get more time too?
Dr. Kate Goodrich:
Yeah, I think it’s probably a few things. One, I think you do have to have is a little bit intangible, but you do have to have the right leadership and culture to be able to start making that transition. It’s a commitment, right, because it really is care delivery transformation.
It is not just bolting on top of a fee-for-service system that now we’re going to pay you a little bit more money, which you may, it may not be much, you know, for doing better on your quality measures, right? Which is how it’s often felt to a lot of clinical practices. It hasn’t felt like a true transformation.
So, there really has to be the leadership and the cultural change to really change the way in which care is delivered. So, I think there’s a few things though, that are necessary.
And where this doesn’t work is where it is, is at least some of the things that may contribute to why some practices aren’t successful.
You really do have to be able to invest upfront in certain resources to be able to allow the care to be delivered differently, which does mean more time with patients, right? It does mean having access to the right types of resources to help deliver care differently. So, there’s at least, I’ll name at least two things.
One is having access to data and really analytic insights is really what I mean when I say data by the frontline providers when they, you know, at the point of care in front of their patient, understanding, you know, if that patient just got discharged from the hospital and being able to know exactly what happened in the hospital.
Having information about their visits to their specialty providers, having information about what care gaps that they might still have and having that surfaced in an easy to understand and tangible way right at the point of care.
It’s also about having data and analytic insights about your population of patients, your panel of patients and understanding, you know, how you’re performing on, you know, A1C control for diabetes or hypertension control or screening rates for your population of patients. And having that easily accessible, as well as financial information about, you know, cost of care. So, I think it’s having data and analytic insights that is easy to understand right at the point of care. That’s number one.
Number two is being able to invest in the right kind of, I’ll say personnel or other types of professionals within your practice that can help you deliver care in in the right way.
So that you as a clinician can really be practicing at the top of your license and not have to fill in sort of administrative gaps that other professionals could be doing.
So, investing in, for example, having a social worker that is, you know, they’re in your office to help care for the social needs of your, of your patient population.
Having a behavioral health specialist, which may also be that social worker, but may be a different social worker to really address the behavioral health needs of your population.
Having, you know, a pharmacist, a nutritionist, a care coach to really be able to help your patients who are discharged from the hospital make that transition from hospital to home to avoid that re-admission. Those are the kinds of investments that are needed.
And then this last thing I’ll say is developing strong partnerships with others in your community also is critical here.
So, as a primary care practice, having strong relationships with the hospitals or health systems in your network and the hospitalist in your network so that there is really great communication between hospital and home, for example.
Having the right kinds of relationships with community organizations so you can make referrals or the social worker in your office can make referrals for your patients with food insecurity, transportation needs, etc.
So those are the types of things that lead to success for an organization, but it really starts with having the right sort of mindset and leadership to be able to do that.
Charlie Fick:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, Kate, a lot of the clients that Lisa and I work with, a lot of companies we talked to are early-stage organizations, entrepreneurs who are trying to build a scalable solution.
And there are a few better ways of building a scalable solution than finding a way to partner with a national organization like Humana or so many of you are sort of counterparts.
And, you know, I am curious, what advice or guidance would you have for entrepreneurs who are seeking to partner with an organization like Humana can be best prepared to be successful in a partnership like that?
Dr. Kate Goodrich:
Yeah, this is something I actually have a lot of experience with here at Humana.
And I’m really glad you asked this question because too often we do have entrepreneurial organizations come to us unprepared. And you want to support innovation, for sure.
But they’re probably a few pearls I can give you. Number one, organization like Humana, we are less likely to partner with an entrepreneur or entrepreneurial organization that is really, really, really, new that doesn’t have any experience with another payer at all. So, we have a whole process for vetting, what I’ll call vendors, more broadly. And one of the things we look for is what their experience has been.
So having some early experience with, you know, smaller payers is, is really important. For us as an MA organization it’s really important that that that our vendors or entrepreneurs understand that there’s are differences in working with seniors compared to say a commercial population or a Medicaid population.
So also having some experience with seniors or at least being able to understand how they might modify whatever their model is to be more senior friendly would be important.
But if you are a vendor who is willing to work with us, to co-create with us, so not necessarily just taking your product off the shelf and implementing it at Humana with our seniors, but you’re willing to work with us because we know our members. We know our members pretty well.
So, we particularly like working with vendors who are willing to work with us on a solution, potentially modifying whatever that the sort of off the shelf solution is to fit our population. And then work with us to really pilot in a market with our members. And what we typically like to do is actually create a study design around that pilot so that we can genuinely understand and actually improve on the pilot along the way.
The biggest barrier, by the way, to the success working with any of these vendors is being able to just simply engage our members. And so, we really want to work with vendors on the engagement model. We know historically we can only engage like 2 to 3% of our members for any given pilot. We’re starting to have a lot more success now when we work with vendors who are willing to co-create with us, including on the engagement model.
And sometimes that means working with the patient’s physician, primary care physician as well to get them engaged. So, we just want our vendors to have a bit of an open mind and be willing to co-create but also be willing to genuinely study the impact of their model or the co-created model while we improve along the way. So, it’s really in some ways more of a mindset, as long we think it can meet a, a critical need for our members, just work with us to try to optimize that for our population.
Lisa Mooney:
Well, you know, as a follow up and really thinking about the burdens we’ve talked about on providers, the challenges facing the system, another big question that’s really a topic that’s near and dear to my heart. Many folks listening to this probably have had experience with family members with dementia and, dementia really more than any other condition, places a unique amount of responsibility and burden on family members and non-clinical caregivers, not to mention clinicians. So, what types of solutions do you think, what kind of innovations can be built or expanded that can help to support these caregivers?
Dr. Kate Goodrich:
Yeah, we are starting to really dig into this one now as well.
Now, not that we haven’t had, you know, it’s been a priority for a long time, but I think as our company is maturing in deploying so more novel either technologies or pilots and learning from that, this is an area that we really need to focus in on. And for a payer, you know, traditionally payers are looking at, you know, outcomes like within a yearlong span because that’s how in MA our bid cycle works. And, and, and like if you’re commercial or Medicaid, often you only capture those members for about a year or maybe a little bit longer. In MA we do have members actually typically for much longer, for seven or eight years, even.
And so, one of the things that we’ve had to develop a discipline around is to look much more longitudinally because you’re not going to make improvements in say reducing total cost of care or anything like that in just a yearlong period when you have a really complex chronic disease like dementia. And often there are other chronic diseases that go along with that. So, we’re starting to think how do we actually focus on this area for the long haul for our members. So, I think there’s a couple of things, at least. One is, I think absolutely still going back to what we’ve been talking about, which is value-based care. So, getting a member and their caregiver connected with a true value-based care provider. When I say true, what I’m really talking about is a value-based care provider that is paid, you know, basically full risk. So, taking on accountability for improved outcomes and total cost of care, because those are the practices where those providers are going to be able to take the time with the member and their caregiver together and might even be able to, you know, have the social worker or the behavioral health specialist in their practice be able to also work with the caregiver.
So, I think value-based care is, is still a very important part of being able to address caregiver burnout, and the needs that a patient with dementia might have.So, I think that’s one thing. We actually know there are a lot of behavioral interventions that actually can mitigate some of the symptoms that go along with dementia, some of the behavioral symptoms that go on with dementia that can be so burdensome to caregiver. So. really leaning into some of those behavioral modifications. I don’t think we’re at a point yet where we can really rely on the pharmaceuticals that are out there. They just haven’t shown the kind of value that I think or really improvements that are really needed in this population. Some of them may be appropriate in certain circumstances, but I just don’t think – and there needs to be ongoing really good research in this area. But that’s not what I think we can rely on right now. And then the last thing is, probably, you know, some better use of technology for, for example, for monitoring. Now, I am not an expert on these technologies at all, but we know that there’s an increasing development and probably piloting and even the use of technologies that can monitor behaviors, movements, taking of medications, all types of different activities in the home that allow for that remote monitoring. I think that is, you know, something that is not widespread right now, but is there’s more and more, you know, innovation in that space. And I would anticipate over the coming even months and years that we’ll see those types of remote monitoring activities really sort of increasing throughout the ecosystem. And I think this is a population that really there’s probably going to be a lot of focus on because we are seeing the burden of dementia, whether it’s Alzheimer’s or vascular, or what have you, growing. And it’s not like there’s like a ton more money in the system that we’re going to be able to throw at this problem. So, I think through, you know, improving the primary care experience for patients and for providers and through better use of technology is probably where we’re going to be seeing more of the innovation in this space.
Lisa Mooney:
I would love to be able to ask you many more questions. It’s been such a great conversation but unfortunately sort of have to wrap up here. So, I want to ask one, one question would love to end on a more hopeful note. What is one thing that makes you optimistic about the future of the US healthcare system?
Dr. Kate Goodrich:
Well, you know, I, I might have mentioned that differently several years ago, but now that I’ve actually had, I’ve had an insight into how care can be delivered in a way that is really, really good for patients and for clinicians through, you know, really, frankly our, you know, our CenterWell experience. I think that we actually know what can work now and we can build on that. I don’t think we knew that before. And so, I’m really excited to really expand upon, if we can really get to primary care reform to really expand upon that because we’ve seen it work like we actually have something that works that we have demonstrated quantitatively improves outcomes and lowers costs. And so that gives me hope that we actually have found something that we actually know that it can happen when we were just experimenting before. So that definitely gives me hope if we can just keep that, keep that going.
Lisa Mooney:
That’s a great thing to end with. Well, and thank you so much again for joining us today. It’s been interesting, insightful conversation and we really couldn’t appreciate it more.
Charlie Fick:
Yeah, thank you, Kate.
Dr. Kate Goodrich:
Thanks for having me.
Closing:
Thank you for listening to the WittKieffer Converge Cast.
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