MedVanta’s focus on a direct-to-employer model is expected to improve access to orthopedic care, Louis Levitt, MD, said on an upcoming episode of the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast.”
Dr. Levitt, chief medical officer of MedVanta, discussed the advantage of this model and its place in orthopedics’ future.
Note: This is an edited excerpt.
Question: MedVanta is focusing on helping independent groups transition toward value-based care and direct employer contracting. Can you give us some insight into why these models are the future of orthopedic care, and share some specifics into how MedVanta is making them accessible?
Dr. Louis Levitt: No. 1, you put the doctor in charge of the care pathway, and decisions are made on behalf of the patient and not on behalf of the corporation. We know that if you look at most self-insured companies across the U.S. right now, their largest spend is in the musculoskeletal domain. We have a very large volume of our own self-insured employees, and we will verify that our biggest spend happens to be on musculoskeletal care, and it goes up every year no matter how hard we work to try to curb those costs. We’re going to offer MedVanta’s platform to an employer, and we think that we can manage the musculoskeletal concerns that the patients have.
When someone comes in with a bad back, they go first to a nurse care center. It may be two weeks before they can see a doctor, and there’s already perhaps an MRI seat that’s been ordered unnecessarily. Our platform puts it right in the hands of either an orthopedic PA or a doctor, seamlessly, they make an appointment, and we can usually keep them on site because we have such a large distribution of physical therapy services. If they require rehab, we can provide it near where they were.
So we’re going to say to the employer that we’ll take the risk, we’ll take responsibility for managing your musculoskeletal care. The third-party solutions that seem to have the perfect solution to managing them have a goal to keep the patient away from the doctor. Our goal is to move the patient toward the doctor and produce the most optimal care, and I think that’s going to be attractive to the employer.