Editor’s note: Interview was lightly edited for clarity.
Question: Highmark was recently named to the Disability Equality Index as one of the best places to work for inclusivity. What do you think makes Highmark worthy of that?
David Holmberg: We’re honored. I think that’s the seventh straight time we’ve been recognized as one of the top places in America to work if you have a disability or a difference. And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that we’re proactive about our partnership. We believe that our workforce should emulate those that we serve. And what that’s done is create a culture of inclusivity. We notice when there aren’t enough people with differences, unlike some organizations that might notice when there’s somebody who has a disability. We’re just the opposite. And what that means is that sometimes with people who have differences in their abilities, you’ve got to have an onboarding program. We work with Joyce Bender of Bender & Associates, and we have a partnership with her organization. For example, this past year we brought in 30 new people who had differences, and it was part of honoring the 30-year anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And with Joyce’s help, we train our managers on how to work with somebody who has disabilities. We focus on what their abilities are, not what their disability is, and it’s all a cultural thing. We’ve learned there are some operational things you have to do to have operational excellence in a program like that. But most importantly, our people embrace it, and we have a culture where the expectation is everybody’s equal, and sometimes you just have to spend a little bit more time upfront and help people get up to speed.
Q: What would you say are your three top goals and priorities for Highmark over the next year?
DH: We truly believe that there’s an opportunity coming out of the pandemic to transform healthcare. And so we’re very focused on that. It’s our living health strategy, which is about taking all the data, taking all the information we have, put it into actionable insights with the patient, the member, the client, the customer in the center, along with their clinician, and giving them tools that are actually usable in helping manage people’s care. You know, there’s so much information, but there aren’t enough actionable insights in a format that’s consumer-friendly. And so we think that’s our biggest priority. Our living health model is about eliminating the islands of payer and provider and instead unifying all of our efforts around the customer and patient.
And so that’s probably the first one. Second one is we just completed an affiliation with Health Now, creating Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield of Western and Northeastern New York. And so we’ll be focused on working together to bring value to the members we serve in New York. And then in addition to that we just announced that we’ll be expanding our capabilities and our depth in the Medicaid business by acquiring the balance of Gateway Health that we didn’t already own from Trinity. And so those things are going to keep us busy.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about Highmark’s strategy behind its acquisition of Gateway Health?
DH: Sure. We’re the largest insurer in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Delaware and now Western New York, and obviously our responsibility is to find ways to deliver care to people. And insurance for people regardless of where they’re at in their life cycle. And investing in Gateway, expanding our capabilities in the Medicaid space, we think, is very important because no matter what, the future of healthcare, to be successful and to innovate, a public and private partnership is what it’s going to take to get it done. And so, we think being involved on the Medicaid side is very consistent with our social determinants of health strategies. We’re highly invested in getting upstream and figuring out how to keep people out of the hospitals and keep them healthy. And you’ve got to do that by addressing social determinants — everything from housing to jobs to education, and there’s no better way to have those insights than to have a strong Medicaid program, which we already do in Delaware which, by combining Gateway, will give us an opportunity in Pennsylvania and give us a platform that we can expand from.
Q: How is Highmark preparing for the surprise billing legislation effective Jan. 1?
DH: Well, we’ve been a proponent of no surprises. And so we are already up and running on making the changes that are consistent with the way the legislation was written, and we want to be in a position so that starting the first of the year, our patients and members and customers are able to take advantage of the “no surprises” rule. So we’re fully engaged on that. That’s one of the advantages we have of having 6 million insured lives on our Highmark platform, plus another 4 or 5 million with our partners. It gives us the scale and scope to be able to make investments quickly and react quickly.
Q: It’s been a very challenging year. What would you say has been your greatest accomplishment in this last year?
DH: I would say our greatest accomplishment is we built a coalition of not only our clinicians but all of our partner organizations in the region — MSA Safety, PPG, the Pittsburgh Pirates, Dick’s Sporting Goods — to stand up and fight the pandemic. It was instrumental in our ability to get such a large percentage of the population in this region vaccinated. We ran the largest vaccination clinics since the ’50s in this part of the country. And I think our greatest accomplishment is the results it’s having. We’re seeing a lower infection rate of the new delta variant, and it’s primarily driven by the fact that we have such a large portion of the population vaccinated.
So without question, we are very proud of that. We’re also very proud of the fact that Highmark, the insurance company, stepped in and was able to advance payments and work with providers to make sure that independent clinicians were able to weather the storm and continue to serve their patients, and the same thing for some of the hospitals and other capabilities that were necessary. But most importantly, I would sum it up as we’re proud of the fact that we all stood together to fight this fight, and it was a coalition of organizations and individuals that was extremely diverse and extremely committed.
