Ken Cohen, MD, FACP, is the executive director of translational research at Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Optum Care.
Dr. Cohen will serve on the panel "The Less-Than-Straight Journey to Value-based Care: Where Are We Now, What's Helping, What's Hurting?" at Becker's Payer Issues Roundtable. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference on Nov. 7-8 in Chicago.
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Becker's Healthcare aims to foster peer-to-peer conversation between healthcare's brightest leaders and thinkers. In that vein, responses to our Speaker Series are published straight from interviewees. Here is what our speaker had to say.
Question: What is the smartest thing you've done in the last year to set your system up for success?
Dr. Ken Cohen: The smartest thing I've done was drive education and cultural change down to the level of the PCP.
Q: What are you most excited about right now and what makes you nervous?
KC: I'm most excited about the success of the Optum Care clinical care model. Scaling it nationally in the face of the rapid growth of clinicians makes me nervous.
Q: How are you thinking about growth and investments for the next year or two?
KC: Patient education around low value care and sophisticated patient shared decision-making are two important priorities.
Q: What will healthcare executives need to be effective leaders for the next five years?
KC: To be effective leaders, healthcare executives will be introducing strategies that unburden clinicians from administrative care and using evidence, data, and technology at the point of care to drive clinical decision-making.
Q: How are you building resilient and diverse teams?
KC: It's a work in progress, but we're doing wrap-around strategies for team-based care.