Jefferson’s new CEO on the future of the healthcare system and having ‘a bigger impact’ [The Philadelphia Inquirer] – InsuranceNewsNet

August 2 – Thomas Jefferson University was named Monday Joseph G. Cacchionea cardiologist who has obtained his medical degree Hahnemann Universityto succeed Stephen K. Klasko as general manager of the philadelphia cream the largest healthcare system in the region by number of hospitals.

Cacchione, 60, was until recently executive vice president of clinical network services at Ascension, a $27 billion Catholic not-for-profit healthcare system with 145 hospitals in 19 states. It should start on September 6 at Jefferson.

The Erie The native spoke to The Inquirer on Monday about his anticipated approach to racing Jefferson. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity:

Jefferson has expanded dramatically under your predecessor, but still has a lot of clinical integration to go through. How do you see this part of your work?

I think the best is yet to come in terms of integration. The back office is important, but what we really need to do next is integrate the clinical entities. If we want to have a greater impact in the philadelphia cream field, and doing it in the most efficient way possible, we need to figure out where we can do what, and then show value to the communities that have entrusted Jefferson with their precious entities, the Einsteins of the world.

You said that a health system is responsible for the health of the communities it serves. How do you measure this?

It is difficult to measure community health, but there are proxy measures, such as avoidable emergency room visits. People… do they have primary care providers? Are they food insecure? Do they have health literacy? These are things that are very, very important when we think about the health of our communities. There is not one perfect measure that gets us there. We just need to start measuring things that have scientific validity. Then we have to act on these things deliberately. Not all impacts come from the health system. They come from our partners.

How it works Health Partner Plans, by Jefferson profession of health insurance, corresponds to your vision?

Obviously, it’s Medicaid-forward right now. There’s a lot of Medicaid lives in there. I think Medicare Advantage will be an important part of any provider-based insurance entity.

We’ll never go out-Blue Cross Blue Cross. There has to be some sort of competition, but we’re going to be more of a niche player, rather than trying to be everything to everyone. I just don’t think that’s a realistic way to run our insurance business.

How do you view the financial challenges currently facing health systems?

Inside healthcare, we don’t quite understand why the patient volume hasn’t returned. It’s not just total hip and total knee replacements that don’t come back. We think a lot of people are still on the sidelines. They haven’t had their cancer screening. We encourage people to get screened because we start seeing late-stage cancer appear a little later because people haven’t had their mammograms or colonoscopies.

We learned [during the pandemic] that many things do not need to be done under inpatient status. The amount of revenue we get on things done in the outpatient field versus the inpatient field is very different. We built a hospitalization frame. We will have to be more balanced in hospitalization and outpatient. We’re going to have to build a cost structure to fit the revenue structure.

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