Rob Read has only been in the job for two weeks but he wasn’t afraid to jump into the hot seat.
Giving Rob Read the third degree hardly seemed fair seeing he only joined Amplar two weeks ago but he wasn’t shy about where the Medibank spin-off is heading, and why politicians can benefit from new models of care.
As Amplar’s chief commercial officer, Rob also spilled the tea about their new model for mental health patients and why he reckons virtual and hybrid prevention programs are low hanging fruit.
What’s been keeping you busy these first few weeks?
What I love to do is actually go and see first-hand what’s going on, what is going well, what is really hard. I’ve done a few road trips and heard from our customers, from our patients, from our clinicians. That can give you a very clear reality check, absent of the corporate jargon, where you can dig deep and go, “Are we delivering what we should be delivering to these patients?”
I’m really focusing on continuing to build out and grow our homecare business, it’s that’s a really important part of the service that we provide as an employer and I think we view home as being incredibly important setting for healthcare now and into the future.
Is home based care the biggest opportunity in health care?
Yes, but also prevention. Prevention is critical and it’s something we do a lot of. Over the next 12 months we’re investing in technology to help make prevention much more scalable and provide more reach at a lower cost.
Very recently, at least in the private system, we recognised that the average length of stay of a mental health inpatient tends to, coincidentally, almost match the funding envelope.
What happens though, is that a mental health patient might stay in hospital 19 or 20 days and then be discharged into the community with no support. There’s a 50% readmission rate within 12 months, so that system is really not working.
Instead, we’re very carefully experimenting with a different model of care that sees a shorter inpatient period but has much more wholesome wraparound support from an outpatient perspective. It’s been live since about March at Deakin Private in Canberra, and we’re seeing really good early signs from that.
The hospitalisation time is used to stabilise and make sure the patient has got the right baseline but then the everything that goes along with living in the community is better supported for a longer period of time.
The patient is able to access virtual psychology and digital tools and other kinds of warp around support.
That all sounds good but hospitals are funded according to how busy they are.
There might not be a political benefit to prevention but there is a financial benefit. If we get primary care right, we will lower the cost of care throughout the whole system. That’s a very well accepted fact.
So, with that context, how do we educate the market that that’s what they need? How do you stand up, as a politician, and say “we’re launching a 400 bed, virtual hospital, instead of a shiny new bricks and mortar building with a nice ribbon”? That’s a change for politicians.
The political narrative can change to, “We’re fixing today’s problems today, not tomorrow. We are opening this (virtual or hybrid hospital) in two months’ time, not in seven years when the bricks and mortar hospital will be finished. We’re not fixing it for three terms of government down the road”.
That’s the distinction that we need to start educating people on. It’s something that politicians could hang their hat on, and it’s really important and hard to do.
That’s a shorter-term political imperative that could be leaned on.
Exactly. There’s a very clear financial story that supports a health care solution that’s going to give an individual the care they need, when they need it. The more that we can showcase that, the better for the system but people need to feel brave enough to do it.
We would also do well to recognise that pace is important in this setting. The longer people are not getting the care they need, the more expensive for the taxpayer in the long run.
The voice of the consumer could also drive the change.
Yes. If we look at My Home Hospital in South Australia, one of the strongest points is the customer satisfaction rate in excess of 90%. It’s extraordinary. Patients are having about a quarter of the hospital acquired complications and saying everything’s so much better.
They’ve told us, “I’m getting home-cooked meals, my pets are with me, and my friends can come and visit whenever they want”. We’ve had 10,000 patients through My Home Hospital now and we’re starting to see former patients recommend it and also put up their hand if they need to be admitted to hospital another time. They don’t want to go into a normal hospital.
We see part of our role as changing healthcare models. The more we can showcase those outcomes, the more we’ll boost the willingness to accept new solutions. That’s one of the great things about Amplar, we don’t have a ‘winner takes all’ mentality. It’s actually more one of, “Let’s show you how we do it” and hope that others adopt that strategy because it will ultimately provide more leverage in the healthcare market for innovation.
What’s the low hanging fruit as you see it?
Digital and hybrid prevention programs. Medibank has done a really good job with prevention, but they tend to be very hands-on programs which means that they are only relevant for certain cohort.
There’s an opportunity to multiply our impact by bringing digital and hybrid solutions to preventative care.
The virtual care setting is also low hanging fruit for us. Finding how to incorporate virtual consults more effectively into face-to-face care so that you’ve got a hybrid model rather than an “either/or”.
Right now, you have to step outside your local doctor to get virtual care – that doesn’t quite feel right. So, we’re looking at how can we help enable my MyHealth and other others to do that within their own four walls, effectively, to keep the patient there.
That’s going to be a really important model going forward and we’re looking to build into a much more integrated proposition.
Wild card question: If you could have a superpower what would it be?
An Imaginary Context superpower so that I could rapidly zoom out, physically and mentally, to get a broader perspective on situations.
Imagine, you can zoom out to see the size of the suburb, or the size of the country, or the globe and you could get that perspective physically.
Or if you’re talking to people, or trying to gain an understanding of different groups, you could zoom out mentally to actually understand their context. Then you’ve got this combination of physical and mental ability to understand and comprehend context.
You could be ‘Meta Man’.
Yes! You’d probably find that there’s a lot more common ground and problems find solutions more quickly. I feel like that would be a good superpower to have.
Cape or no cape?
It would be a secret superpower so no cape.