You elevate your healthcare experience in 2024. Discover the driving forces shaping the healthcare landscape with the NRC health experience perspective. Be the first to access the insights and trends informing the future of healthcare. Register now to join the live national webcast and get first access to the report. Secure your spot@nrchealth.com this is Laura Deirda.

With the Becker's Healthcare podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Seth Kabati, who is the chief executive officer at MSU Healthcare. Seth, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Very excited.

Now, I'm looking forward to our conversation and really learning a lot more about what you're doing at MSU Healthcare and just how you're thinking about the future and what's ahead. But before we dive into my questions, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background?

Sure. So I've been at MSU Healthcare for about a little under five years now. So career in academic medicine. So before here was at Mount Sina Health System, had a long stint there, but I've also worked in the payer sector, little behavioral health and even in the private world of healthcare as well. So really a diverse background that I kind of like to bring to every day of work at MSU.

Well, that's amazing to hear and definitely great to have those experiences draw upon because I know healthcare is changing quickly and certainly there is a lot to do in glean. Now, what are some of the biggest issues that you're following in healthcare right now?

Yeah, so I would say the whole kind of health systems which are battling with insurance companies. Right. You see, even to the likes of they're suing each other, it just seems like all the tickers that come out every day, whether it's on beckers, you'll just see some sort of disagreement that's happening between payers and health systems. The segue is in seeing that, and I do think that the future of healthcare is a paveider. Right. That's a popular term being used these days. And the segue is that we've actually launched our own Medicare Advantage product, and then we have a few other insurance products that we'll be launching both in the commercial world and then continue with Medicare Advantage or in the player based world, I should say. So we want to get in that game and also just really be what I think is the future of healthcare is a pay rider, which is where MSU healthcare fits that model very well.

That's fascinating. And certainly, as you mentioned, we do see a lot of those paired disputes in some of the different challenges going on there. When you look at transitioning from just the traditional health system into the pay viter and being able to launch those products, Medicare Advantage plan and additional health plans as well coming forward, what does it take to really do that? What kind of resources and how do you prepare and then plan to actually make that so?

Well, there's two ways. So if you're maybe a larger health system than ours, we're really a mid sized entity. If you're large health system, again, you can launch the health insurance products on your own. In our instance, we partnered with an already existing health insurance company. It's Henry Ford's insurance product. And so we've launched our products with them in partnership. And so it's really kind of a quick speed to market, whereas they're the administrator, and then we can partner with them and launch products pretty quickly. And that also just kind of keep going into the employer based insurance products, which is really a big play for, you know, MSU is a self employed entity. Right. So all the students, the employees and the retirees, again, all self insured. And so basically that is the health care costs are really on the dime of the university. And so what we're doing is we're launching our own insurance products to then take control of all of those parts of the university for health care, for the health care cost, and then obviously be able to reduce the spend eventually and offer a higher quality of care.

That's fascinating to hear, and certainly I can imagine an interesting process to embark on. Has it made you think any differently about kind of the organization, enterprise as a whole or really just continuing to support your mission and efforts in being able to contain more of that health care process within the health system? Yeah.

So to your first point about the understanding the organization of a whole, it is fascinating. The health care spend is for the university, it's in the hundreds of millions, but yet the understanding of, you know, how to get control of that, how to, again, look at where employees are going for cardiac or orthopedic care or pharmacy. Right. Pharmacy is a huge spend. Looking at all those things, you'd be surprised that the, I don't want to say the lack of it, they certainly are looking at it, but having somebody from a healthcare sector, a health system look at it, it is very enlightening to have these conversations because there is just so much opportunity and there's so much spend and so much of an expense on the university as a whole or any large employer, again, the benefits office and HR, which has usually been running the healthcare of companies, I think that there's just a lot of place for opportunity, for sure.

Well, that's great to hear. And I'm wondering too, when you look ahead, what are you most excited about and what makes you nervous?

Yeah, so most excited, I would say the whole direct to employer play, which is, again, what we're kind of doing on our own, meaning the direct to employer with our own employer. And so that's what makes me most excited. I think that whether you're a mid sized health system or a large health system, taking care of your own employees and your own health care costs, or getting reining in your own health care costs, I think is a tremendous benefit. We don't always necessarily, we, when I say again, academic medicine, don't always look at things that way. And so that's what gets me most excited about us with MS Healthcare. What makes me nervous is just that on the flip side of that, as I do see large employers taking care of their health care cost on their own or looking at their spend on their own. So, for example, we have a pharmacy, we have a service line of pharmacies, and if you look at other large employers in the area, they're looking at their pharmacy cost and saying it's quite a high spend and they're looking to reduce that, which then affects us, or they're looking to handle the pharmacy internally, whether it's with a digital or an online pharmacy.

And again, those are all in competition with what, at least with some of the ancillary services that we have. And so that's what I'm most nervous about.

That's really interesting. And I could imagine it just continues to evolve and grow. And when you look at some of those changes, potentially changing the dynamics of how traditionally the health system is operated, how do you work with the teams in order to make that transition as smooth as possible and really gain buy in for where the health system is going?

Yeah. And so it's a lot of communication, it's a lot of the basics of huddles with my team. I think I had mentioned this last time we spoke, I had just launched doing two or three huddles a week with my team. It's made a tremendous difference within just our day to day and our strategy of our organization. And so what I also really try to focus on is there's two layers. There's the looking inward of the organization, the day to day operations. But then there's looking outward with the relationships, and the outward is becoming the more dominant focus. Everything from trying to change the culture of how healthcare is looked at within university or the healthcare spend. And then of course, all of our competitors and really our frenemies, we have competitors, we might compete with another entity on one specialty, but then the other one, we're coming together on a partnership. So it's a lot of frenemies out there.

Interesting. Definitely a fascinating landscape. And like you mentioned, dynamics kind of across the board and how you're relating and partnering, competing on many different levels. Given some of those dynamics and other changes, what do you think the most effective healthcare leaders will need to be successful over the next two to three years? Yeah.

And so I think it's becoming more and more business oriented, which sounds strange, but healthcare is born out of academic, not for profit. That's really the basis in the country, I think. And so it's going at it from a business sense. The privatization of health care is coming in from the tech world, from the direct to employer world. And there's a lot of competition out. There's a lot of options out there. And so much like running any other type of business, it's having leaders that are business savvy and be able to make decisions, make a decision and move forward. I think it's really important for a healthcare leader over the next two, three, maybe even ten years.

I love that. Seth, thank you so much for joining us on the Becker's Healthcare podcast today. This has been like a fascinating conversation. I'm excited as well to keep things going at our annual meeting in April. I know you'll be speaking on a panel and attending the meeting, and it'll be just a great time to have some really interesting conversations about the future of healthcare. So I'm looking forward to it.

Thank you. Me too. I look forward to seeing you there.

Elevate your healthcare experience in 2024. Discover the driving forces shaping the healthcare landscape with the NRC health experience perspective. Be the first to access the insights and trends informing the future of healthcare. Register now to join the live national webcast and get first access to the report. Secure your spot@nrchealth.com.