EP259: What Are Payers Looking to Solve For Right Now? With Rahul Dubey of Percynal Health Innovations

Rahul Dubey is the founder of Percynal Health Innovations. He’s also the former chief innovation officer at AHIP—that’s America’s Health Insurance Plans. AHIP is a trade group for insurance carriers, health systems, best-in-breed solution providers, and others. Rahul has created what he calls strategic working groups, in which he gets together essential stakeholders within a regional geography to collaborate and figure out innovative best-in-class emerging solutions and approaches.

The first thing they do in these strategic working groups is to identify common problems. Since the best solutions solve the best problems for the most stakeholders, this seems like a pretty decent way to start. What are some of the challenges that Rahul has identified with payers and providers and other stakeholders to solve for? Here’s your listicle:

1. Really get to population health management and just population health
2. Operational inefficiencies
3. Information trafficking without getting anything out of it is not gonna work anymore
4. Level up health literacy

Here’s a point Rahul makes that I’m continuing to think about. He says that payers should be grade aggregators—aggregators of data, aggregators of solutions that they should be able to distribute to other essential stakeholders. I heard somebody else say the other day that the new payer is more like an entity that provides comprehensive services.

You can learn more by connecting with Rahul via email or LinkedIn. 

Rahul Dubey is CEO of Percynal Health Innovations and the Founder of America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) Innovation Lab. Rahul is currently responsible for collaborating with C-level executives at his health plan. Prior to joining AHIP and launching Percynal Health Innovations, Rahul held a leadership role as a founding employee of a successful digital health care start-up based in Washington, DC. Along with the company’s cofounders, Rahul was instrumental in developing a multifaceted consumer tool as well as leading the company’s “go-to-market strategy,” resulting in successful market penetration and revenue growth for the industry’s first consumer-led shared decision making and treatment selection platform.

Rahul was recognized with the Smart Health’s 2018 Excellence in Healthcare Transformation award, was named the American Journal of Health Promotion’s 2017 Innovators and Game Changers, and is featured in Accenture Perspectives: Minds Driving the Future of Business. In 2017, Frost & Sullivan presented Rahul with one of their highest honors, their Global Visionary Innovation Leadership Award.

He is a graduate of the University of Michigan–Ross School of Business and lives in Washington, DC, with his son. He invites you to contact him directly—that is, if you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and drive transformation through inflective collaborative.

02:08 The stated needs of payers.
03:24 “Where are the inefficiencies that we can actually cut out of the system?”
05:14 A reverse approach to meeting the needs of payers.
06:35 Information transfer—what this means.
09:42 “Innovation is a team sport.”
13:12 The “optimal solution.”
18:49 “The lines of communication and business model creation … it’s getting very creative right now.”
20:10 Data play and finding key insights.
20:49 “A more definitive risk.”
21:24 Vendors as “solution providers.”
21:33 “The great aggregators”—collaborating optimally.
22:39 Brian Van Winkle and Rishab Shah on NODE.Health’s “Ease of Doing Business.”
25:16 “It’s more relationship innovation and business model innovation than technology.”
27:02 Rahul’s advice to health plan collaborators, like insurance carriers.
29:44 Rahul’s advice on how providers can collaborate better.
30:37 What’s essential to payer success.
30:56 “Who are we trying to serve?”

You can learn more by connecting with Rahul via email or LinkedIn.