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Welcome to This Week Health Conference. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of This Week Health, a set of channels and events dedicated to leveraging the power of community to propel healthcare forward. Today we have an interview in action from the Fall Conferences on the West Coast.

Here we go.

All right, here we are from the

Health Conference, another

interview in action, and we have caught up with Glenn Tolman, CEO for TransCare. Glenn, always great to catch up. It's great to see you as always. Huge announcement feels like it was just last week. It might have been in the last couple of weeks.

Signed up 10 health systems. Talk a little bit about what that announcement was about.

So the announcement was really the first independent provider ecosystem, and the idea behind it was How do we get health systems more involved and more directly connected with employers? And this is large and mid sized self insured employers.

So, we went to these health systems and we said, How can we connect you in ways that make it easier for people to access high quality, affordable care? That's what we do at Transcurrent. And healthcare systems said, as you might imagine, what's in it for us? So we said, what if we pay you for care the day you deliver that care?

Just like we do in every other part of our economy. So when you go to a restaurant, you generally pay for your meal. When you buy things and get services, you pay for them. What if we do that? And they were elated, and they said, if you do that, we'll give you very cost effective pricing. We will give you preferred access for your members.

We'll make it easy, reduce all the billing problems by having an on site presence. But most important, we selected

the highest quality,

most innovative health systems across this country. And that is really the core of a network that is over 300 Centers of Excellence today. But starting with these 10 foundational partners that are really going to change the way care is delivered.

So, pretty exciting stuff.

I'm not going to do a call out and have you name all 10 because that would be like a quiz right now. But there were significant health systems, very large health systems across the board. So is that going to be integrated into the experience? Am I going to be able to go on the Transparent app and be able to interact with my Transparent agent and essentially say, Look, I have...

Diabetes and I'm looking for care in this community, or even better yet, I think it's surgery, essentially. Hey, I need surgery, that kind of stuff. It's surgery,

it's procedures, but what we're really doing... is, we said to people, you ought to be more of a health consumer.

And yet, how do you do that if, where do you go for high quality surgery? None of us know. And so what do we do? Well, we call a doctor if we know, and we ask her or we ask him, where should we go? Sometimes it's a foot doctor and we're asking them about heart surgery. We just assume they're going to know.

What if you had a resource in the palm of your hand, just like your phone, and you could look at your phone and instantly get access to who are the highest quality providers at the highest quality facilities, because you need both. And what are their quality records? How close are they? Are they available?

And are they covered by my employer and or by my plant? So that's now all available right in your hand along with other benefits like 60 second access to care. So Care in 60 Seconds, a pharmacy marketplace that allows you to find all of the best places to buy your medications at the lowest cost. And by the way, we include GoodRx, we include Mark Cuban, we include Walmart's lowest prices all in one place.

And then Care at Home or close to it. So partners like MedArrive or Dispatch Health along with those local systems to say where you want your care and can't be delivered at home. And last but not least, we mentioned surgery already, complex care, like cancer care. God forbid someone's dealing with cancer, how do we make sure they're getting the right information?

How do we get them a second opinion? You know, When you're going to a restaurant, you ask somebody, is it any good? But when we get heart surgery, in many cases, we don't get a second opinion, and we need to. So, all bundled together, and that's what we're doing at Transparent.

You don't live in Florida. I live in Florida.

It seems like every conversation starts somewhere and always ends up in healthcare. So it's yeah, I saw this doctor and they recommended, those kind of things. Generally, it's really hard to find that information. It's all very... Is this I'm trying to think through the technology stack a little bit.

You have to be aggregating a ton of information to talk about Pharma, Mark Cuban, all those things. You're aggregating that data, you're aggregating the physicians, you're aggregating Is the experience a digital experience for me, or is it a more analog experience, like calling, transparency?

No, it's a digital experience, but I like to think of it like, we don't say, are you going to, are you going to do digital banking? No, No. We don't say, are you going to do digital travel? We just say, are you going And so, when we think about it, I think of it as the perfect place that combines all of the digital and analog in one place.

But it starts, and

I see you, I don't know if we can see you on camera, holding your phone. That's exactly what you would do. You would look at your phone, it would look back at you, it would log you on, and you'd touch your phone to access these experiences. Now, at any time, if you want to talk to a person, you can do that instantly.

And that's really key. You're in control. But what we're building is a platform that puts all of your health and care in one place. And nobody's really done that before. And yet... Amazon is one place. It's the everything store and you go to Travelocity and it's one place for United and American and Delta, who's a great client of ours I should add, and many other airlines.

And so what people want is make my health care less confusing. Less complex, less costly, and make the experience one that feels like the rest of the economy. And that's what's been missing, and that's what we're delivering. 📍

  📍 We'll get back to our show in just a minute. We have an excellent webinar coming up for you in November. We had an excellent conversation about AI in September with three academic medical centers around the topic of artificial intelligence.

It really was exceptional, and we released it on our podcast channel so that we could share it with a wider audience. I wanted to explore that topic a little bit more, and I asked a couple of additional health systems to join us to explore the use of generative AI and other forms of artificial intelligence to see if we can identify some pragmatic approaches to how health systems are looking at taking advantage of this technology.

The webinar is on November 2nd, 1pm Eastern Time, 10am Pacific Time. You can reserve your spot on ThisWeekHealth. com and one of the things we love is that you can submit your questions in advance and we can make sure that we, answer those questions and keep the webinar relevant to the things that you're looking to talk about.

So, please join us November 2nd, 1 p. m. Eastern Time, 10 a. m. Pacific Time. Now, back to our show. 📍

 It feels to me like you're making, you're building an economy. The economy in healthcare has never really existed.

And for an economy to exist, you have to have economics major. Perfect information. the ability for the consumer to make a decision. We haven't been able to access consumers. We haven't had that perfect information. So you're bringing that information to me so I can make those decisions. Exactly. So we have MSK you have diabetes, you have behavioral health.

Are there other areas that you're expanding into? Yeah, it's essentially

care across.

So if you start with,

What's called virtual primary care today, any kind of urgent care, and we don't necessarily deliver that. We give you the choice and the options to get it as quickly and as easily as possible.

So this is, first and foremost, you got to make it easy for people to make the right decisions and get the right care. And so you talked about that. You got to give people information. So in many cases, we say, oh well, either people don't want to be in charge of their care, or no, everybody wants to be in charge of their care.

They haven't had the right information to do that. So make that easy, and when you think about it, anything bad happens, you need knee surgery. You go and you ask people, where should I get it? And then, once they tell you, you say, can you get me in? Do you know anybody? Well now we're bringing that level, instead of saying do you know anybody, we're saying no, you automatically know somebody.

We've got you preferred access to some of the best brands in America, to Baylor, Scott White, to Advocate, to Atrium, to Partners, to on and on, to Rush, and Chicago, and and I could go on. But that's what's happening, so, too often we say health care is at two levels. There's, you know, a level for people who can afford it and everybody else.

And what we're saying is everybody deserves the best information, concierge care, and the like. And, you know, it's interesting one of our partners later today, founded by, a tennis pro, Andy Roddick, and he said, I'm getting great care. Why shouldn't everybody get the same kind of care that I get?

And so now we've incorporated his new company into our platform.

You mentioned Delta. Is it still large employers that are predominantly the clients? I think

large and mid size is where we're really focused. And interestingly, large employers already have a lot of point solutions. So they come to us and say, love the platform.

Can you put our existing point solutions on the platform? The answer is yes. Because I always tell people, don't rip out what you have. Let's make it better. Let's get more people to use what you have. And, let's fill in what's not complete. So, no one has chat in 60 seconds, and we offer that, and that's immediate access to care.

And that's the first step, getting the information. So, that's one piece of it. For the mid market, they say, we'll take your whole platform, because we don't have time to go out and look at 50 different separate point solutions.

I'm looking at this conference. There's a million booths out here. I would assume you've been approached by a number of them saying, Hey, can we integrate this in?

Do you normally take those requests from the clients? Or say, hey, we're going to integrate these things? Or are you out looking at some of these

different things? It's a combination. I love everything to be client driven. So first member driven, so health consumers, the people who actually use it, and then clients.

who in many cases are buying it. So that's, that's golden. If you can have clients come to us. But then we're also constantly scanning for what are better solutions for our clients. And, we're unlike so many people out there who've done this. We're not taking a sliver off of every transaction.

That's got to go away. The underhanded deals have to go away. The self referrals. All the stuff that doctors aren't allowed to do. Now we see benefit consultants and other folks taking money when they're supposed to be independent. And so we don't do any of the kickbacks, any of the rebates, any of that.

We're simply transparent about what we do, and the employers are

loving it. Well, I end every interview with you the same way, which is, You're not done until I can offer it to my 10 person company. Because that would be we would sign up tomorrow. And I also just want to thank you for being a partner with This Week Health.

We've been we've been able to raise 55, 000 this year for Alex's lemonade stand. And it's really due to our partners and your, and so I appreciate that. Well, thank you. Thanks for all the good work

Another great interview. I want to thank everybody who spent time with us at the conference. I love hearing from people on the front lines. It is phenomenal that you shared your wisdom and experience with the community and we greatly appreciate it. We also want to thank our channel sponsors who are investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.

They are CDW, Rubrik, Sectra, and Trellix. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.