Lessons Learned at HLTH 2021

Last month, Cohere Health sponsored and attended the much-anticipated HLTH 2021 conference in Boston. HLTH is a meeting point of the healthcare industry’s most innovative minds, with leaders from across the healthcare ecosystem in attendance: from payers and providers, to investors and startups. As a rapidly growing technology company, we were thrilled to be part of HLTH’s in-person return and part of the conversation around what comes next for innovation in healthcare. Here are a few key takeaways from the event:

Innovative payer organizations are ready to redefine prior authorization as a mechanism for delivering high-value, patient-centered care. Throughout conversations across the four-day event, our team continued to hear the feedback that simply automating the outdated, burdensome processes around prior authorization and utilization management wasn’t enough to make meaningful change to what is an inherently broken system. There was genuine enthusiasm around Cohere’s digital-first approach to not only automating prior authorization, but also reimagining the end-to-end process, an approach validated by the news of Cohere’s recently expanded relationship with Humana announced just prior to the event.

In addition to a number of productive and insightful meetings at the conference, we were proud to sponsor a private event at Boston’s spectacular waterfront Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). Like Cohere, the ICA represents the leading edge of creativity and innovation, and was a fitting backdrop for new and old friends across the ecosystem to meet, mingle, and reflect on HLTH. A terrific time was had by all.

This year’s agenda focused heavily on themes of care transformation; operationalizing health data; the new health consumer; and the “tech-tonic” shift towards a more digital, patient-first approach. At COVID’s onset, we had to quickly adapt to and embrace technology to address acute healthcare needs and virtually convene the often disparate parties that deliver care. Almost 2 years later, the telehealth space is crowded with new solutions; to retain market share, some companies are even creating DTC solutions that could also further fragment care delivery. As more and more players enter the space, there’s ample opportunity for Cohere to provide the data platform for payers to easily pilot and assess at scale the efficacy of their new vendors.

Moving beyond telehealth, HLTH and its participants are proactively seeking digital solutions to solve healthcare’s more chronic issues that cause waste, friction, and unnecessary cost. We spoke with many national health plans that are focusing on utilization management as a mechanism for such change. Humana, for example, is leading the way for UM and CM transformation; to this end, they decided to partner with Cohere to not only digitize their authorization processes, but also to leverage our evidence-based care paths, AI, and analytics capabilities that increase collaboration and enable better, patient-centered care.

With our clinically validated, evidence-based digital authorization platform, Cohere is uniquely positioned to help payers achieve these goals by reframing prior authorization not as an obstacle, but as a vehicle for better care. By digitizing, modernizing and automating antiquated authorization processes, we’re able to help our clients reduce unwanted variation, accelerate approval times, increase provider satisfaction, and improve care delivery, all while preserving important benefits like patient safety.