Shantanu Nundy, MD, is worried that healthcare will fall into its typical pattern of improving the system—siloed and vertical. But the Covid-19 pandemic offers leaders an opportunity to be far more wholistic as they reimagine care delivery. “How do we make the system itself more resilient? There’s a finite amount of resources,” Nundy, chief medical officer of Accolade, a personalized healthcare company serving millions of Americans, tells Oliver Wyman Partner Tom Robinson in the latest Oliver Wyman Health Podcast. It’s incumbent on leaders to ensure that innovation unleashes a more personalized healthcare system says Nundy, who is also a primary care physician at Neighborhood Health, a federally qualified health center in the Washington, D.C. region. Virtual care, for example, may be great for some patients and conditions, but ill-suited for others.  “We have to get far more granular,” he says. “A lot of these interventions are great if you target them to the people who need them. The moment you start to give them to everyone, you start to dilute the value.”

Listen to the Podcast

Show Highlights

• “What we started doing during the pandemic is using data to pull a different list of patients by age and co-morbidity each week (in the electronic medical record) and start calling those patients proactively and saying, ‘Hey, you're now eligible for the vaccine.’”
• “Drive-thru testing actually works extremely well in a fee-for-service environment. You actually churn visits way faster. There's no new regulation or payment model needed. It's the same nurse doing the same thing that they would do inside the clinic outside of the clinic. And yet for the past 30-40 years we have people that are sick … wait in a waiting room … just so they can see us for a few minutes and get a test.”
• “What’s happening with the vaccine rollout and potential for those models post-pandemic gets me so excited. We are literally going from household to household now giving people the vaccine or signing them up for it. You talk about meeting people where they are … should we be doing that for diabetes? Should we be doing that for colon cancer screening?”
• “There’s innovation coming out of the wazoo, but is it really part some overarching goal that is then part an overarching vision? I don’t think so.”