Taking stock of resources and creating strong collaboration has been a key effort in battling diabetes, which Robert Groves, MD, chief medical officer at Banner|Aetna, said is a "hidden epidemic."
With diabetes killing three times as many people worldwide as COVID-19 last year, Dr. Groves said that tackling the disease has led to internal synergy and initiatives that target pre-diabetics.
The approach to diabetes represents looking out to the horizon, one of the most fruitful parts of the joint venture, Dr. Groves said on "Becker's Payer Issues Podcast."
Below is an excerpt from the podcast. Listen to the full interview here.
Dr. Robert Groves: The first job that I asked our teams to start working on a year and a half ago was, let's just get an inventory of all of the services that we provide for diabetes at Banner Health and all of the services we provide for diabetes at Aetna. All of the services now that might be available through clinics or health hubs, let's organize those. Let's try to put that in one place so that a member or a physician can go to a single location and identify what services are available to that patient, which ones are appropriate and how to access them in real time.
Now that may sound like something very simple to do, but it is incredibly complicated. That's why so many people have trouble getting healthcare — because they really don't understand what's covered. They don't understand how to get access to some of the services that are available to them. So we have co-leads — a leader from Banner and a leader from Banner|Aetna — that meet on a regular basis every month and talk about how we're going to organize this into a coherent narrative that provides real disease management wherever that patient happens to be.