Interview with Dr. Randall Krakauer, Aetna
Interview with Dr. Randall Krakauer, Chief Medical Officer, Medicare, Aetna.
Q: There’s been a lot of buzz in the media recently around models of care that improve patient/family satisfaction while also lowering costs of care. Why do you think that now might be the time to make an impact in improving advanced illness care?
A: Now is the time for a couple of reasons.
First, we’ve (speaking of C-TAC and other stakeholders) accumulated the right groups, from health systems, health plans, community care organizations to policy makers and communication experts and many others.
Secondly, there’s heightened interest in achieving higher impact in medical care and health care coverage, especially with treatment and coverage of advanced illness care. We’ve shown that you can achieve the greatest impact when you turn informed care decisions over to patients and families to make in partnership with their clinicians and provide them with the necessary information and support to better coordinate care.
Q: What makes the 2013 Summit on Advanced Illness unique?
A: Better care management of advanced illness represents our very best opportunity for real impact on the intersection of quality and cost. There is no better opportunity. The speakers at the Summit are the pioneers who have demonstrated this impact: they’ll talk about what they did and how to replicate it.
There will also be policy makers, health economists, leaders from faith communities and caregiver advocates – these groups usually don’t get in the same room together to dialogue with clinicians about how to improve quality of care for some of the sickest and frailest people in America.
There is no propriety information here. We’re going to see innovators who want to inform others of what they’ve done to ensure that the best care is available for patients and families.
Q: Who should come to the Summit?
A: Certainly better care management for people living with serious illness is going to become increasingly expected from clinicians and system’s leaders.
If you are in an Accountable Care Organization (ACO) or another arrangement where you’re accountable for outcomes, then it would be greatly beneficial to engage in strategies to improve medical management for advanced illness.
Those presenting at the Summit have tested models of care management that have been shown to work – and we have networks, such as C-TAC, that can help you effect change in your community or institution by using best-practices from these models.
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Dr. Krakuaer is a speaker on the panel, Assessing the Benefits and Costs of Transforming Advanced Care moderated by Mark McClellan on January 29, 2013. He will be sharing new data from Aetna’s Compassionate Care program managing advanced illness.
Join Dr. Krakauer and other leaders at the Summit and help us build a Roadmap for Transformation January 29-30!
Space is limited and registration is required.
