Ami Parekh has spent the majority of her career as a physician at academic medical centers, including helping to lead population health, clinical integration and accountable care efforts at UC San Francisco.
Recently however, Parekh decided to move to San Francisco, California-based care coordination company Grand Rounds as its first chief medical officer sharing the responsibility for shaping the company’s provider strategy.
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“I think for me Grand Rounds was really the way to democratize access to the kind of care I was privileged to be able to provide at the academic medical centers where I practiced,” Parekh said.
In her previous roles, Parekh was responsible for purchasing technology from vendors and said she has faced a fair amount of startups looking to disrupt healthcare. What’s refreshing about Grand Rounds’ approach – in her opinion – is that the company balances optimism about improving the system with solutions to the real problems that its customer face.
The appointment of Parekh fits in with a new focus of Grand Rounds, which has broadened its mission and business ambitions from being a platform for expert second opinions to becoming a health navigator for the employer market.
Last year, the company launched Grand Rounds Summit, a product meant to act as an entrypoint for an employee’s healthcare journey and provide clinical navigation and guidance on that path. These include services like linking patients to appropriate in-network physicians and connecting them to other benefits offered by their employer.
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Grand Rounds was initially founded as ConsultingMD in 2011 has raised more than $100 million from investors including Venrock and Greylock Partners. The company, which employs around 400 people, counts Costco, News Corp and Comcast as customers and covers 4.7 million members.
Parekh touted her previous population health experience as integral to the new direction the company is taking.
“Grand Rounds has supplemented its focus from ensuring everyone has high quality expert opinions when they have a problem to how do we shift a population from getting OK care to really great care,” Parekh said.
“I will bring a focus on measured outcomes and really trying to figure out how with Summit we have the metrics to show we’re making people’s lives better at a scale that’s in the millions.”
It’s primarily a quirk of history that the majority of health coverage in the United States is provided by employers. During WWII, companies legally restricted from raising wages started offering healthcare benefits to differentiate themselves from competitors.
Since then, there has been an expectation that employers will provide health coverage for full-time employees. That expectation has run headlong into the larger cost problem in the country’s healthcare system.
Employer healthcare costs continue to increase year-over-year and many companies have sought to combat these jumps by shifting to high-deductible health plans and investing in technology-enabled tools intended to route workers to higher-quality (and lower cost) care.
Parekh said as the ultimate payer for a large portion of the country’s healthcare services, employers have strong leverage in being able to drive change in the system.
“When you’re paying the bill you have influence that sadly the patients themselves don’t have,” Parekh said. “Work and life are intricately involved and that’s what’s going to lead to your healthcare anyway, so it’s not unreasonable that employers would partner to insure healthier lives for the employees.”
This connection has led digital health vendors to target employers as a potentially lucrative customer base and there has been corresponding fatigue with the sheer volume of potential health solutions promising to improve outcomes and lower costs.
Care navigation itself has become an increasingly crowded field even in Grand Rounds’ backyard, with fellow San Francisco companies like Castlight Health and Collective Health competing for big-name enterprise clients.
Ultimately, it appears that the winners in the space will be those able to prove out their value with research and metrics and cut through the range of potential point solutions to the few that actually work as advertised.
Picture: Phototechno, Getty Images
