Q&A: Included Health on specialty care and personalized health tools

President of Included Health Robin Cherry Glass sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss the company's offerings and activities during the JPM Healthcare Conference.
By Jessica Hagen
02:20 pm
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Robin Cherry Glass, president at Included Health

Photo courtesy of Included Health

Robin Cherry Glass, president at virtual care company Included Health, sat down with MobiHealthNews at the company's office in San Francisco outside the JPM Healthcare Conference to discuss its initiatives in specialty care and beyond and its participation in JPM.

MobiHealthNews: How has Included Health participated in the JPM Healthcare Conference?

Robin Cherry Glass: Our CEO, Owen Tripp, spoke at the conference and had a really good session, talking about where we're headed with personalized all-in-one healthcare at Included. Then, we've been busy running all around the city meeting with lots of partners and clients and other key players in the industry. So, this week has been exciting and a good start to the year.

MHN: What are some key partnerships the company has formed?

Glass: One of the topics that Owen covered in his session is really the work that we're doing as a company to move more toward a new kind of value. So, if you think about the way that the healthcare system has been working, somehow the two players that are probably most important to healthcare (the individual receiving care and the party that's purchasing that healthcare) has largely been left out of the discussion.  

We talk about providers and patients, and health plans and members, and so we've been really re-centering on how we contribute that value both to individuals and to purchasers. And so, as part of that, one of the big relationships that we've announced is the work that we're doing for CalPERS, which is the employee population of the State of California.  

On January 1, we began serving that population, over around 250,000 members, with our full suite of services, which includes care delivery and then also advocacy and navigation and personalized all-in-one healthcare for their population. 

And part of it is that now we're signed up for shared savings on that relationship, and so we're working with them and with Blue Shield of California, the TPA [third-party administrator] they selected to drive impact on their cost trend over time, getting that down to 3% in five years. And we've signed up for really meaningful amounts of our fees to be at-risk, which means that when we outperform that trend, we enjoy the benefits of those savings, and then are also on the hook for anything that falls short of that. So, we're really excited. We're putting our money where our mouth is on our model.

MHN: So, what is in store for Included in 2025?

Glass: It's going to be a busy year. We've had a number of important launches like this one that we're working on. And when we think about what we're doing, we're really focused on, how do we deliver access to great care? Some of that is care we deliver on our platform, some of it is really helping individuals find high-quality providers in their community with answers. So, helping individuals figure out what they should do in important moments in their care journeys and then advocacy and really helping them with the financial and administrative aspects of healthcare.

So, we're focused on that body of work. We're doing some interesting things in pharmacy this year. We've got some launches planned there. We're doing work in in-person care in new ways for us. All of what we've done to date has been in the virtual modality, so excited to be doing that. And then we've also launched a new set of services around specialty care. And so, the first of those launches was cancer, which went live on January 1.

MHN: How does Included Health work in specialty care?

Glass: Included Health has been in the specialty-care business since the very beginning, with our expert medical opinion offering, but really, what we're doing now is expanding more into the care-delivery side of specialty care. It's something that we see as this point where the individuals who use our services so often experience the hardest parts of healthcare when they have a really serious condition, and so in specialty care.

And our clients have said to us, "We have so many different point solutions, and it's just overwhelming. So if you could provide more of that support, it'd be really helpful." 

So we're starting with cancer, and then we will launch a number of other specialties over time, but really, at the crux of it, we're providing access to care within seven days, which is essentially unheard of in specialty care, and then we're also providing a bunch of wraparound services to help with the seams in healthcare. So, in the case of cancer, we won't be treating oncologists, but we will do symptom management, things like that, as part of the offering, and just help people at a really critical point in their healthcare journey.

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