Expanding east

American Health Network was attracted to joining Optum because our vision and the vision that Optum had for the future of healthcare, lined up perfectly. A lot of medical groups, if you look at HealthCare Partners, New West Physicians, Everett Clinic, we were all talking to each other before we joined anything. Once we decided we needed to be part of a larger organization, we started talking about what that organization might be.

Any physician organization today, where there's an aggregation doctors, the reason they're aggregating is to defend, they're defending against this kind of windfall of decreasing value, increasing costs, chaos.

Our country has been so top heavy with investment in hospital systems, in specialty care. And we do some of that, so well, I mean, that's one of the great strengths of healthcare in our country. Where our weakness is though, is in delivering care to everybody. And that's where OptumCare is here to change that.

I started at Riverside in 1980, as a small pediatric office in Jersey City, New Jersey. My phylosophy was to treat every child comes to the office the way I take care of my own children.

The history of ProHealth is interesting, and it goes back 20 years. 81 little practices, all primary care came together, and decided to create this new group, ProHealth Physicians. ProHealth New York was started 21 years ago in 1997, by Dr. David Cooper, who was a physician in the Long Island market, and saw that hospitals were starting to employ physicians, and thought that, physicians should be the ones to employ physicians.

Light Medical Group was founded actually in 1929, we just recently celebrated our 90th anniversary. We are probably significantly more bureaucratic than in the days of Dr. Fallon 1929, but I think the essence of the organization really has never changed. And the essence is a complete focus on how we take care of our patients, and how do we take care of each other.

You look at the Northeast of the country, and what we have here now, we have ProHealth Physicians, we've got Riverside in New Jersey, we've got ProHEALTH New York, and then we've got Reliant up in Massachusetts. And how do we begin to come together as OptumCare to really change the way healthcare is delivered in this region? New Jersey is unique because it's a smaller State, with a tremendous amount of volume. And it's surrounded by massive health systems, where people get their care outside of the State.

I grew up in New Jersey, it's not uncommon for a family to work in the city, grow up in New Jersey, visit their family on the weekends in Brooklyn and in the summer go across Long Island into the Hamptons. And no hospital system or these tertiary academic medical systems are crossover to even a couple of States. Optum has 300 doctors in New Jersey, 300 doctors in Connecticut, and almost a thousand in New York. And so we are a Tri-State health system for a hyper commuter community.

The key is going to be to have New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and likely Pennsylvania, as well as Massachusetts to be able to work in a very contiguous, seamless fashion, so that we truly become OptumCare Northeast, and be the largest health system in the Northeast without a hospital.

There are some clear cut examples of some things we're doing in the Northeast with Riverside ProHEALTH New York, ProHealth Connecticut and Reliant, looking at a call center, for example, a very, very effective way for us to actually serve our patients better because now instead of any one of us having sort of limited ability to do it, we'll have a world class call center that we're all gonna be able to leverage. I'm incredibly excited about it because I do think the ability for us to borrow from each other is gonna be an absolutely key component to our success.

What we want Optum to be known for in the Northeast and across the country, this is the place where you bring your family and you wanna make sure that they are getting the kind of care that they deserve to get, the highest quality, and we can also do that in a way that's affordable. We should be able to manage the delivery of care in a way so that everybody in our country can have access to high value healthcare.