Amy Khan, MD, executive medical director of Regence Health Plan, and James Grant, MD, chief medical officer of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, each joined "Becker's Payer Issues Podcast" to discuss the pandemic and what they've learned about making healthcare accessible to all.
Here are excerpts from each episode. You can listen to Dr. Khan's full interview here and Dr. Grant's here.
These interviews have been edited lightly for clarity and cohesion.
Question: Looking ahead, what does your strategy look like for the next 12 months?
Dr. Amy Khan: It reflects several focus areas for stronger collaboration with employer clients, engaged providers and connected members to better manage population health and further integrating health data to identify health improvement opportunities, and then reaching through digital platforms, promoting cost transparency and sharing quality outcomes with members and providers. Regence also recognizes that the pandemic has impacted seniors, Black, indigenous, other people of color, and economically disadvantaged persons to a much larger degree. We are already proactively addressing this inequality in several ways and have plans in place to continue this work throughout 2021.
Question: How have your priorities and focus changed in the past year since the pandemic began?
Dr. James Grant: We contributed over $5 million to help our physician partners improve and get their telehealth systems up and running, improve their platforms and improve their technology. We waived the copays for telehealth services for our members for several months.. Our current goal is to get more and more of our members vaccinated. Another thing we're able to focus more on is behavioral health, and we've put a lot of the focus on increasing our telehealth platforms for behavioral health.