Here’s a potentially big idea, friends! In order for practitioners to focus on great patient experiences, payers/payors (the insurance companies) need to incent the delivery of great patient experiences. In this article we take a look at Devoted Health, a “payvidor” that focuses on delighting patients when they need it most. Brothers Todd and Ed Park founded the Waltham, Massachusetts-based combo healthcare payer and provider in 2017 with the driving principle that love matters . . . that a culture of love for each other and for patients is important to sustainably providing the best care possible.
A MedCity News journalist wrote last year, “When asked about the main differentiation between Devoted and some of the other insurance startups, the Parks had a simple, if somewhat trite, answer: love.”
Because love is a loaded term to use in the workplace, it’s worth stating that they focus on establishing familial–type (not romantic) love. The article quoted co-founder Todd Park as saying, “The standing order for the whole company is when doing any action or making any decision ‘close your eyes, imagine the face of someone in your family you love desperately and ask yourself if you were making the decision to impact him or her directly, what would you do?’”
Devoted aims to build a health care plan that treats every member like they are family; its logo is a heart. Compare this mission to a few organizations we selected that are roughly comparable:
Kaiser Permanente believes it exists to provide high-quality, affordable health care services and to improve the health of their members and the communities they serve.
Clover Health says its mission is to align with physicians by reducing doctor-insurer friction and increasing visibility into the health of each patient, leading to improved care.
EmblemHealth‘s stated mission is to create healthier futures for its customers and communities.
The point is that unlike the three comparison points, Devoted has a focused, human mission rooted in empathy.
As far as execution, we see three key ways Devoted is achieving its goal of love for patients. However, before we delve into those three operational strengths, we want to make sure this article isn’t misconstrued as a puff piece for Devoted. We’re not investors in Devoted, and with this moonlighting gig where we write articles about patient experience, we aren’t in the business of serving as the marketing arm for companies. We co-author articles as our version of healthcare writing-and-change-agency. We are hugely committed to the idea that organizations must improve delivery of the patient experience. Despite being impressed with the Devoted strengths, we want to state that Devoted is today an unprofitable experiment. Being dependent on investment capital for its survival, it hasn’t proven that its hypothesized points of strength will work as a long-term, sustainable company that generates profits.
Okay: back to our regular programming . . . the specifics of how Devoted is able to improve the patient experience where others can’t and don’t.
- First, as a payvidor, it’s an insurance company that also is a healthcare provider. This sounds like an HMO, and that’s not a bad comparison except that Devoted is obsessed with building a culture and operating style of empathy and tech-friendliness. It’s perhaps more of a combo HMO and PPO in that it connects members to care providers in most locales but in Florida and Texas it has providers on staff (and plans to add more states). Also, it doesn’t capitate payments the way many HMOs do. It is empathetic in that it offers a suite of support tools and services for its members such as house calls for those in need and health guides to support health system navigation. And it’s tech friendly in that it says it “uses technology to blend health insurance with provider services.” There’s no ideal comparison because the Devoted model is novel and disruptive. If you search the term “payvidor,” you’ll find Devoted listed over and over again. We like its payvidor model, its mission, its positioning, its lexicon, and its plan because for healthcare to change, payers must embrace a focus on the patient experience. Only when payers value positive patient experiences will others in the value/supply chain value patient experience. Devoted controls the purse strings and makes payments based on “what we would want for our mother.”
- Second, Devoted has a narrow focus with its services and patient base. The services it provides are primary care and its patient base is exclusively Medicare patients. By focusing on senior primary care, it has fewer dizzying decisions to make about the whats-whys-and–wherefores of positive patient experience. It’s heavily focused on virtual care and televisits. In the states where it provides care (under the name Devoted Medical Group, or DMG), Devoted has offered—well before the pandemic and before its competitors—televisits. The company believes telehealth is a key contributor to excellent, integrated primary care for the elderly. Todd Park has described the model as much like Kaiser Permanente except with a focus on virtual care and Medicare populations. Devoted also supports house calls and supports and reimburses the use of cars to take seniors to and from their appointments, having found that transport is a fundamental need of seniors for a positive patient experience. Because Devoted isn’t trying to change all of medicine for all people, but rather trying to improve the experience for Medicare patients seeking primary care, it can expertly tailor services and technology with modern, custom services like telehealth and transport.
- Third, Devoted is founded and led by leaders experienced in the business of healthcare, a basic but often overlooked tenet of success in the business of healthcare. Todd Park co-founded athenahealth back in 1997 as a revolutionary midwifery service but reinvented as a medical records company. By the time he departed in 2008 and long before co-founder and CEO Jonathan Bush was forced out, athenahealth had grown to the point of being a public company with 20,000 medical–provider customers. He also was the Obama administration’s chief technology officer. His brother, Ed Park, joined Athenahealth in 1998 and led technology and operations there and remained in an operational capacity until 2016 after which he remained on the company’s board till February 2019. In scaling Athena to $5 billion, he gained a couple of decades of experience in how technology can be used to serve the needs of patients. The Devoted bench is deep, having attracted an extraordinary and capable team of business and healthcare professionals. Devoted employs Aetna’s former senior director of service operations and senior Medicare compliance officer as its head of Medicare Compliance. Heading up clinical partnerships is the former chief clinical integration and network development officer of New York-Presbyterian. Leading technology is the Former US Chief Data Scientist. It seems to adhere to one of the co-author’s (Joe’s) tenets, which is: don’t make a business person your medical head; don’t make a medical person your business leader. In other words, the Devoted model makes sense, it is intuitive, and it is so smart!
As you may infer, we really like that Devoted is a payer whose founding premise is to offer a great patient experience. Payers need to value patient experience if other organizations in healthcare are going to value it. And, we appreciate that Devoted combines the provision of care with paying for it because this aligns its actions with its incentives.
We have great expectations for Devoted, which we also blend with a “wait and see” attitude. Why? Because with 5 offices and 370 employees, it’s a microscopic spec in the $4 trillion industry; it has a long, long way to go to reach anything approaching scale in terms of driving new, improved norms across American healthcare. Plus, who knows how long it will take to be profitable and sustainable? As venture capital investors pour money into scaling it up, we’ll end this article where we started it–we find much to admire in the fact that Devoted is a payer obsessed with the unit economics of love–building positive patient experiences one family-member at a time.
Editorial Note: Neither Joe Mandato nor Ryan Van Wert, MD hold shares in any company mentioned in this article, and neither one has interviewed for or held a job at any company mentioned in the article.
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Joe Mandato has spent his career leading numerous high-growth organizations developing disruptive technologies used in clinical healthcare settings. He has often held overall responsibility for his teams’ strategic implementation of programs designed to enhance and improve the clinician-patient experience. Today, he invests in and serves on the boards of companies in the life sciences. He also writes about and teaches the business of healthcare.
Ryan Van Wert, MD has worked as an intensivist in critical care settings, where he gained deep understanding of the realities of the physician-patient interface. He has led medical device and IT companies, including his current role as co-founder and CEO of Vynca Health, which specializes in enabling improved advanced care directives among patients and providers. In these roles, Ryan has learned a lot about patient engagement and healthcare communication. He is also assistant director at the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign.
