Creating the future of health care

At Optum, we are creating the future of healthcare. We have the opportunity to bring this together where we can now take all of these teams and assets that we've both acquired and grown ourselves over the past 10 years and bring them together, led by our physicians, but really focused around delivering a unique and differentiated experience for our patients.

I think the future of care is completely dependent on us, physicians. We're the ones that are gonna have to transform the way that we deliver care in this country, we're gonna have to take responsibility for how we redesign the healthcare delivery system, and we're gonna have to be strategic in how we go about our business dealings within the markets.

How do we create a low-cost healthcare ecosystem that doesn't rely on significant hospital beds, but is all focused around value to the patient, value to our health plan payers, and importantly, supporting our physicians doing jobs that they love.

Being physician-led is so important because physicians, clinicians, have one goal in mind, which is to take great care of patients.

I think we can be successful at transforming healthcare in our country if we concentrate on doing it one community and one market at a time.

We have to face the marketplace as one organization that's going to deliver excellent care to our patients, attract new, young physicians who wanna be part of what Optum is bringing to the table. We have this unique opportunity to transform healthcare in this country, and that means we need to be one OptumCare, one team, with one goal, and that is better care for patients, better experience for physicians.

Focusing on our goals of having a world-class patient experience and a world-class provider experience are actually two sides of the same coin from my point of view. We have a responsibility as an organization to recognize the administrative burdens that have been placed on our physicians and our advanced clinical practitioners, and we really need to commit ourselves to relieving those burdens at every step that we can because each of those burdens and administrative layers gets in the way of the physician or the provider being able to reach out to the patient and connect with them deeply and personally in a way that will enhance their outcomes and give them a better chance of being able to get back to the healthier life that they want to live.

We should be the preferred provider in these key markets of local care ecosystems around the country, whatever your age, multi-payer, risk-based programs where it makes sense, of all ilks, and so really deploying a whole suite of business models that are almost invisible to patients so that they can just get the care that they need when they need it.

I think to create the future of care is going to require for us to have a common vision of what we wanna be when we grow up. I think we're still very much in our infancy, but I think it's the engagement and the common culture that are gonna be the absolute keys to us being successful.

We all have a responsibility to start to pay attention to the rising cost and the low-value care that's being delivered in our country, and there's nobody that can change that but the physicians that practice medicine here.

I think what's clear about the future of care is that it's really about providing the optimal or the right care for the patient, and we're trying to do that by balancing quality, cost and satisfaction of both the patient and the provider.

We have legacy ways of delivering care. We have to rethink those pathways of care and understand, is there a better way for us to bring digital technology into our platform to lower the cost of care, to kinda meet people where they are and bring them what they need.

It's also going to require highly engaged patients, and so I think we will use technology in very different ways, whether that's home-based monitoring or other ways for patients to interact with their care team in a way that gives patients what they need and keeps the provider available for what's truly needed from them.

The next great hurdle for optimal care is a focus on both patient education and patient-shared decision making so that over time, patients begin to understand that more care doesn't equal better care, that it's the exact right care that equals the best care.

With OptumCare, we have an incredible opportunity in front of us to literally create the future of healthcare in the United States and beyond, and I am incredibly honored to be a part of this journey with all of you, so thank you. This is going to be great.