This episode features an interview with Suzanne Usaj, Senior Director of Total Rewards at The Wonderful Company. Suzanne leads strategy and execution for the company’s compensation, benefits and wellness suite of programs, delivering value to over 10,000 employees globally. In this episode, Kirk and Suzanne discuss The Wonderful Company’s unique approach to health benefits, including their focus on preventive care, direct contracting for specialty care, and the important role of their onsite wellness centers.
This episode features an interview with Suzanne Usaj, Senior Director of Total Rewards at The Wonderful Company. Suzanne leads strategy and execution for the company’s compensation, benefits and wellness suite of programs, delivering value to over 10,000 employees globally.
In this episode, Kirk and Suzanne discuss The Wonderful Company’s unique approach to health benefits, including their focus on preventive care, direct contracting for specialty care, and the important role of their onsite wellness centers.
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“ When someone really needs help, when they're experiencing a situation that they've never experienced before, which is a lot of the complex conditions in our healthcare system, how do we find specialty partners that may or may not be in those broad networks? But we build our own network and incentivize our members to go to that. So you still maintain a little bit of that benefits philosophy where you feel like you need choice, but you're driving people to be able to help make it easy for them to make high quality, low cost decisions for them and for, like I mentioned, the entire healthcare system.” – Suzanne Usaj
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Episode Timestamps:
*(00:57): Suzanne’s career journey
*(04:41): How The Wonderful Company serves their geographically diverse workforce
*(10:16): How Suzanne works within and outside the system
*(16:04): Connecting employees with suitable providers and streamlining the process
*(21:11): How The Wonderful Company uses data to work upstream
*(27:30): Clinics role in The Wonderful Company's strategy
*(32:52): What’s next in Suzanne’s strategy
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Links:
Connect with Suzanne on LinkedIn
Learn more about The Wonderful Company
Learn more about Collective Health
[00:00:00] Kirk McConnell: Healthcare costs are rising. Benefits are confusing. And the system doesn't always work for the people who need it most, but it doesn't have to be that way. Smart employers and their brokers are flipping the script, cutting costs, making things simpler, and creating a health benefits experience their people love.
[00:00:22] Kirk McConnell: Welcome to the Benefits Playbook. I'm Kirk McConnell, and in each episode we uncover the bold strategies that are rewriting the rules of self-funded health benefits. Well, hi everybody. Today we are joined by Suzanne Usaj, Director of Total Rewards at The Wonderful Company. Suzanne, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:00:40] Suzanne Usaj: Thanks for having me, Kirk.
[00:00:42] Kirk McConnell: There's a lot that I want to talk about today, especially when we think about your role at The Wonderful Company, both some of the things that makes The Wonderful Company unique as an organization, but probably more importantly, some of the work that you're leading there and how y'all think about benefits and the healthcare of your people.
[00:00:57] Kirk McConnell: But before we get to The Wonderful Company, let's start with you. Tell us a little more. What was your path to The Wonderful Company?
[00:01:02] Suzanne Usaj: Yeah, I mean this part of my career journey started about 15 years ago. Before that, I was a early childhood development and behavioral therapist, so you could kind of see a theme once I started to get into this that there's always like the core of like, how do I really help people?
[00:01:17] Suzanne Usaj: And the problems just got more challenging, more complex, and I hopefully at the same time got to help more and more people. When I shifted into this part of my career, I was doing more education for employee benefit. Supporting employees in different healthcare decisions, whether that be the benefits they choose or the actual situations that they were going into treatment or otherwise.
[00:01:38] Suzanne Usaj: And then just actually about seven years ago, I shifted into a little more than that, but seven years ago I did some progressive work just before The Wonderful Company with Live Nation Entertainment. I know that they were on a podcast of yours recently. I did benefits with them and then actually transitioning to a wonderful company got me a little bit more to, like I mentioned at the start of my career, trying to solve really complex problems and help as many people as I can.
[00:02:00] Kirk McConnell: So what's more challenging early childhood developments or fixing the US healthcare system?
[00:02:05] Suzanne Usaj: Man, I had a feeling I was setting myself up for that. I would say for me, early childhood development, if I was working with behavioral therapist as a behavioral therapist and some of those children have much better people helping them now, I think I've found my true calling now.
[00:02:22] Kirk McConnell: Well, why true calling? What is it about this work right now that feels like it really aligns with what gets you going?
[00:02:28] Suzanne Usaj: Yeah, I mean it feels very much like a David and Goliath story. I mean, I think David, even in the story, if I remember well enough, was really equipped to fight, not necessarily that big of a, a challenge, but the best one to kind of help try to fight that challenge.
[00:02:42] Suzanne Usaj: And so I know that there are other people that don't have all the equipment, resources, support as me. And so I think that's what really drove me to fight something that's bigger. I've always really liked complex challenges and. Like you just asked very eloquently, there aren't many more challenges that are bigger than the US healthcare system, and I think that everyone experiences that on a daily basis.
[00:03:04] Suzanne Usaj: And I think being able to really get it at its core, at the core of the healthcare system, where inertia and opacity and things like that all kind of conflate to create the biggest challenges. And really at its core, when people just want support and help, none of those things actually solve problems. So I try to get those outta the way so I can help that other people.
[00:03:27] Kirk McConnell: And speaking of challenges, The Wonderful Company is an amazing organization that also has some unique challenges when thinking about healthcare and the needs of your people. So if you start by tell us a little bit about The Wonderful Company at a high level.
[00:03:40] Suzanne Usaj: Absolutely. We are very wonderful. I know that catches people sometimes when I tell them where I work.
[00:03:45] Suzanne Usaj: It is a very wonderful company, lowercase W, but The Wonderful Company is a combination of consumer product brands, beloved healthy snacks and good free products like Fiji Water, pistachios, the Get Crackin’ Pistachios, Halos, mandarin oranges, other citrus products, Teleflora, and many other brands that many of you would be familiar with, The Wonderful Company has about 10,000 employees globally.
[00:04:11] Suzanne Usaj: But we also happen to have in the US on our health plan, which is what my responsibility lies with about 10,500 members on our plan. So that'd be a combination of employees and their family members in the US. And so being able to reach all across the country and help people in different areas is really helpful.
[00:04:27] Suzanne Usaj: The Wonderful Company, really the heart of Wonderful is in California, Central Valley, where a lot of our food products come from the agricultural center of California, and we really do try to work and support the communities that we're in as well.
[00:04:41] Kirk McConnell: Tell me more about those 10,000 people. You mentioned agricultural.
[00:04:45] Kirk McConnell: How do you think about them? Tell me a little more about the geographic mix, the different products or services they work in, in the office versus outside the office.
[00:04:54] Suzanne Usaj: It's a great question because industries are never really that descriptive what companies do, and especially for a role like mine that really wants to meet people where they are.
[00:05:03] Suzanne Usaj: Agriculture to us does mean a variety of roles in the food system. If you were to follow a pistachio from growth, which we do actually own all or many of the trees that the fruit and nuts come from. So if you follow the life of a pistachio. Some of our employees actually are growing and caring for the actual trees in the farming sector.
[00:05:28] Suzanne Usaj: Some are actually packaging and processing those in a production facility. And then some. Actually a fun one if I can interject. I was trying to follow the life of it. I actually forgot the very beginning of that. We actually have a division that manages bees. And so they're actually helping pollinate and and manage the crops even before they actually bear fruit.
[00:05:49] Suzanne Usaj: So all along, even though I didn't follow it chronologically, all along the life cycle is where we have our agricultural employees and they're all supported by employees like myself and my team that do work in an office. I would say that's maybe half of the employees are less, but even within that portion, we're not all fixed behind a computer like I am now.
[00:06:08] Suzanne Usaj: Many of us are out in the field as salespeople and working with various reps and making sure to support the communities that we're in.
[00:06:18] Kirk McConnell: And with those different populations, I have to imagine all the different needs within it. How do you think about benefits at The Wonderful Company? What journey are you on as an organization?
[00:06:28] Suzanne Usaj: Yeah. I mean, most of the credit, especially for inspiring me and day-to-day for what I do, goes to the owners of the company, Mr. And Mrs. Resnick, they actually, a long time ago, well before I joined, Wonderful. Had just asked our employees, right, so what do you need to be your best self? And their questions kind of grouped into support for my children, housing, and then support for my health journey.
[00:06:56] Suzanne Usaj: And that helped shape what the Resnicks then did to reinvest back into our employees' lives, and that is mostly, I mentioned the Central Valley, but we do have employees in South Texas. We have employees scattered across all, you know, almost all 50 states. Not all 50 states, but almost all 50 states. And so even though that most of those efforts from the Resnicks came from and were born from those initial questions that they asked, the larger populations that we have, we've been able to scale that across the country to various
[00:07:27] Suzanne Usaj: different groups of people and make sure that we, at the very least, and especially back to my area, are getting at preventive, proactive measures to help people maintain their health. Since that was one of the top three things that people cared about.
[00:07:42] Kirk McConnell: So let's talk more about that third area, the health.
[00:07:46] Kirk McConnell: What do members and employees feel like they need the help with the most there?
[00:07:52] Suzanne Usaj: You know, honestly, I don't know if it's that much diff, the one of the main things is not that much different than everyone else. If we all knew exactly what we were supposed to eat, then none of us would be eating Hostess packaged goods and drinking a soda.
[00:08:05] Suzanne Usaj: So it's just really difficult to make good decisions when there are a lot of different factors that play into it, whether it be access, cost, knowledge, like understanding what the right decisions are. So at least if I focus on just those three things, we try to actually take all of those barriers and just remove them or facilitate a much better, like, equity of knowledge of food or equity of, like, what the price might be.
[00:08:32] Suzanne Usaj: A good example of that, just like quickly, is that in our Los Angeles office, we do subsidize healthy choices and we make sure that in our cafeteria we have healthy food. But a price for the exact same meal in Los Angeles might be different than it is in our Lost Hills, California office, which is a much more rural location, and where they don't have a fresh fruit grocery or fresh produce grocery store close by.
[00:08:55] Suzanne Usaj: Right? The person in Los Angeles might have well-known brands where they can pick up salad that just came from the Central Valley, just a day or two prior. But in the Central Valley, all the food leads there. So the plate that might be $7 with really healthy food in Los Angeles might be only $4. And they might be able to get, you know, a take home meal at our Mercado to be able to make sure that if they like to cook and they, we can bring that back into their home and bring those lessons across, not just at the workplace.
[00:09:26] Kirk McConnell: That's such a, a fascinating nuance. There you have some universal needs, but there's so much local nuance. In how to actually fill it, but also the desire as an organization to be equitable across all your different populations. How do you balance those things?
[00:09:43] Suzanne Usaj: I mean, really, it's hard, I think. I think true balance is very difficult 'cause you're always following one, one side or the other, which is I think what balance
[00:09:53] Suzanne Usaj: really is, is practicing going back and forth. But I do believe that a lot of what The Wonderful Company and with the guidance of their Resnicks did was find the lowest common denominator or the most need and try to lift that up and then make sure that everybody else is kind of met in the middle.
[00:10:09] Suzanne Usaj: That's kind of the adjustment factor that I was referring to.
[00:10:12] Kirk McConnell: You talked about David and Goliath earlier. You have a lot of interesting challenges or needs within your population. One option is just to work within the system, work with the big players, take off the shelf products. How do you think about working within the system versus maybe rolling up your sleeves and working outside of the system?
[00:10:36] Suzanne Usaj: I am extremely lucky to be able to do both. When I mentioned that survey that we did for our employees. One of the things in the healthcare realm or improving people's health was working completely outside of the system. And that doesn't mean that other employers or other providers can't do this as well.
[00:10:54] Suzanne Usaj: But what I mean by we worked outside of the system is we just decided, hey, one of the core issues when we go deeper into what are your healthcare needs. Many of those were related to, it wasn't just food insecurity, it was once they did have the right food, it was actually knowledge and being able to be accountable to the different chronic conditions that were already in.
[00:11:14] Suzanne Usaj: The population or any particular family. And so when we saw that Type 2 diabetes, as an example, was one of our key challenges. Then our clinics really focused on what's the metabolic condition that creates this chronic condition? How do we support that with medication, lifestyle, et cetera, and wrap all that around.
[00:11:32] Suzanne Usaj: And really, the clinics that we've built are in no way, just some onsite clinic for if you get a cut or you need urgent care. It goes far beyond that and deep into people's lives. And then I would say I still also, I work deeply with them, but my team also works within the healthcare system. We do quite a few things, I think, to try to tackle in that David and Goliath, that this one is actually tackling it head on.
[00:11:56] Suzanne Usaj: I mentioned earlier the idea of inertia and you know, really difficult lack of transparency being challenges and so, we just ask so many questions and I'm given a lot of support to ask the hard questions and always be the one to not allow that inertia to just say, you know, I'll outsource my knowledge or my answer to this question, or outsource all the, the support to our employees and their health plan.
[00:12:22] Suzanne Usaj: Instead of doing that, we actually try to do a lot of it ourselves. Maybe that is kind of inspired by, you know, working outside of the system. So working inside the system. I think we've taken a lot of that on and brought some partners that are really willing to do that with us. And I think building things that don't look like the traditional healthcare system.
[00:12:41] Suzanne Usaj: But kind of as a Trojan horse, going in and doing it within the system has also been pretty successful over the last few years.
[00:12:48] Kirk McConnell: What advice would you have for other benefit leaders who are wrestling with that nuance of, do I roll up my sleeves and maybe take the harder path, which is work outside the system, or try to find an easier path?
[00:13:03] Suzanne Usaj: Is it okay if I have a third answer?
[00:13:05] Kirk McConnell: Sure.
[00:13:06] Suzanne Usaj: I actually think it's rolling up your sleeves and working inside the system because then that will help make the system better for everybody and especially in the future, right? It won't allow that inertia to keep the main gold challenge healthcare system as difficult as it is today.
[00:13:24] Suzanne Usaj: Difficult defined by, you know, wherever you are in the system, whether it's skyrocketing costs over the last 15 years, whether it's, you know, I'm just a person and I don't know how to get care. Whether it's worsening health outcomes, all of those things make our healthcare system really difficult. It's not a healthcare system.
[00:13:41] Suzanne Usaj: It's more, as many people say, a sick care system. And so I think actually back to your questions, going into the system, rolling up your sleeves and figuring out like who's motivated to actually help change the system, who's not, and use the ones who are to then kind of try to change or go around the people that are not to build a better system.
[00:14:04] Kirk McConnell: Who are some of those partners you're leaning on right now? Are those areas where you have good support trying to work within the system?
[00:14:12] Suzanne Usaj: Yeah, I mean the really interesting thing is to get to the answer to that question, I think the structure has kind of shifted outsourcing to like one broad network and having all claims and all resources, administrative and operations go through one partner, I think was a bit of the challenge.
[00:14:30] Suzanne Usaj: You have conflicts of interest. You have, on a broad network, you're essentially saying, Hey, everyone, choose whatever you want. But if you have a healthcare situation that you've never been in before, you don't know what you want. You just want the best care. And so those systems didn't truly serve people.
[00:14:46] Suzanne Usaj: I think they served the company, they served a benefits strategy, and by that I mean, you know, Hey, come here, your doctor will be in our network. It'll be fine. But then when you actually want to change things, I think what I've seen is instead of relying wholeheartedly in. Putting everything into that basket, kind of building your own areas of, we have some specialty care partners.
[00:15:07] Suzanne Usaj: I mentioned the idea of when someone really needs help, when they're experiencing a situation that they've never experienced before, which is a lot of the complex conditions in our healthcare system. How do we find specialty partners that may or may not be in those broad networks, but we build our own network
[00:15:28] Suzanne Usaj: and incentivize our members to go to that? So you still maintain a little bit of that kind of benefits philosophy where you need you, you feel like you need choice, but you're driving people to be able to help make it easy for them to make high quality, low cost decisions for them and for, like I mentioned, the entire healthcare system.
[00:15:47] Kirk McConnell: So let's pause right there for a second because you said two things that seem so simple but are crazy complicated. So, go outside the network to create kind of your own set of providers and incentivize people to get the right care. Let's talk about that first one. How do you think about bringing the right providers together?
[00:16:07] Kirk McConnell: How do you do that tactically?
[00:16:10] Suzanne Usaj: Yeah, understanding the population, whether that's, you know, your own population, if you're a smaller employer and you have unique needs, or if you're a larger employer and you're kind of following either population health metrics or you kind of follow the generalized state or nation that you're in, in the US.
[00:16:26] Suzanne Usaj: Then identifying what those key challenges are, and for many, it’s surgeries, inpatient costs. And then other specialty care, like grouping into diagnosis related groups. So if it's, whether it's cancer or other specific conditions that can very traditionally be pretty high cost, determining what those are.
[00:16:46] Suzanne Usaj: And then really trying to look into the market in the space, whether it's directly into, if it, since I mentioned cancer most recently, the NCI designation centers, and then starting talking to them to say how are they tackling the problem? They're also, of course, in our employee benefits landscape.
[00:17:03] Suzanne Usaj: Partners that have also seen, you know, not just myself or you, Kirk, but others have seen that these are challenges and problems and they're really trying to figure out how to solve it in a new novel way and partnering with them to do so. And so they might be building ways for employers like The Wonderful Company to direct contract without having to have all of the resources to find those
[00:17:23] Suzanne Usaj: lowest cost, highest quality, and also then maintain upwards of 200 different contracts. Obviously not like the 20,000 or 200,000 that the broad networks have, but it is still a huge feat. So finding partners that are willing to do the legwork once we've found our need, I think it's been super helpful.
[00:17:42] Kirk McConnell: And then once you go through that process, how do you then make that accessible and understandable to your employees?
[00:17:50] Suzanne Usaj: That's always the challenge, right? Because I really hope that at The Wonderful Company and really any company, this is just my 2 cents of Suzanne speaking. I hope that everyone uses the healthcare system once a year.
[00:18:02] Suzanne Usaj: That would mean everyone's healthy, everyone's getting their medicine from their food, everyone's getting their stress management from good sleep and meditation and whatnot. But knowing that that's not always the case when people do have to use the healthcare system more often than. We hope to just find, use data upstream to find those people so that they, not all 10,500 people on our plan have to remember, oh, we have this partner, we have this incentive benefit for this specific surgery.
[00:18:32] Suzanne Usaj: We use a lot of data to help make sure that people are aware when they might be kind of a rising need or, you know, have a condition that is kind of developing. So I think that's the biggest thing is data. And then we just try to really make sure that we are communicating in a way that's really easy to understand and not in medical jargon and not just listing everything off.
[00:18:52] Suzanne Usaj: So I think that was kind of a two part strategy, is find the actual people who really need us and communicate to them instead of everyone. But because they need to answer the phone and we need to make sure that they know who's calling and how to trust and expect it. We do some broad based knowledge and awareness about our culture and about our products and programs in a way that people can understand and trust that we're gonna be there for them when they need us.
[00:19:17] Kirk McConnell: I don't think anyone has cracked the communication piece of that yet. What have you learned? What works, what doesn't work in your population?
[00:19:26] Suzanne Usaj: Yeah. Back to this idea of, you know, administrative employees or office-based employees versus those who might be out in a field or in a facility and packing house.
[00:19:35] Suzanne Usaj: Understanding those nuances is important, right? The administrative employee might get a little irked by the sixth email in a month about a program, whereas those emails are not reaching someone in our packing house 'cause maybe they don't have a company issued email address and they haven't kept their email with us current.
[00:19:53] Suzanne Usaj: So we need to be aware of maybe we target or combine communications into a digestible format or a quick webinar where we can explain all of these specialty resources in one or all of our chronic condition management in one. And then for our more frontline employees, I'll call them for them, we make sure to communicate to the home.
[00:20:15] Suzanne Usaj: I think really using leadership, so understanding and knowing how employees get their communication. So getting to the home is really their spouses and adult children, but when we're reaching those employees, we have something called like a qué pasa. And for anyone who speaks Spanish or doesn't speak Spanish, that's a what’s up?
[00:20:32] Suzanne Usaj: And so it's just giving people currently what's going on and being able to have that avenue to explain just one thing every now and then, it's a lot easier for it to be heard and understood if it's coming from a voice. That you're familiar with and trust. So I think that's one of the biggest things that we learned as far as like methods of communication.
[00:20:50] Suzanne Usaj: But I'll just definitely reiterate that using data to find the actual people that really need the support in a particular, this cancer program may help this particular person. That has definitely, I think, been the best way because that's, I think, the definition of meeting someone where they are.
[00:21:10] Kirk McConnell: So let's go there.
[00:21:11] Kirk McConnell: How are you using data and how are you leaning on your partners to identify who that right person is at this specific moment?
[00:21:20] Suzanne Usaj: Yeah, we work really hard on traditionally using very well identified, whether it's CPT codes or prior authorization codes to identify, if we were to use an example of, someone who might be on a journey and might have to end up in some kind of cancer treatment.
[00:21:35] Suzanne Usaj: I would say traditionally, even for myself, I assumed or believed that five years ago we had to wait for some claim that had a diagnosis on it. But nowadays, I think it's a lot easier for us to be able to demand interoperability between partners and for them to talk about the different ways in which they can find things earlier, number one.
[00:21:53] Suzanne Usaj: And I think number two is there are also, I would say, some form of automation or even generative AI, where it's a lot easier to find someone even earlier in the journey, even before a prior authorization or a diagnosis occurs. And an example in that same cancer situation might be that someone gets a mammogram, has a follow-up visit where they're doing an ultrasound.
[00:22:18] Suzanne Usaj: Which might indicate that there were some concerns on the first side, on the first screening. And so before there's even a diagnosis, we're able to reach out to that member and let them know that there's a resource that they have available to them.
[00:22:31] Kirk McConnell: And when you say reach out, how are you reaching out to folks?
[00:22:34] Kirk McConnell: Is it through you? Is it through the partners you work with through different channels? How do you think about that bit?
[00:22:41] Suzanne Usaj: Yeah, we really try to make sure our members understand their privacy and their healthcare journey is theirs. We want to help them, nudge them to the right path, help be as a resource for them, but it is theirs.
[00:22:54] Suzanne Usaj: And so because we have privacy as one of our main concerns and focuses, we do try to make sure that they have, like I mentioned earlier, the awareness of, generally, that we have a cancer program. They don't have to remember that if they're in a situation, they've got a lot of other things going on, and that's where we come in.
[00:23:14] Suzanne Usaj: Then if they have a general awareness that we have a program or that they trust us and we trust the partner. Then we hope that the partner reaching out will be well received. A lot of times nowadays it's just a technical glitch. You know, a lot of people may not answer it. A lot of people don't even answer their phone, even if they know the person calling.
[00:23:32] Suzanne Usaj: But if someone doesn't answer the phone, they can't really get the voicemail or they might not listen to the voicemail. That's where we do try to make sure to use a lot of our resources internally to nudge folks and make sure that if we know that there's a group of people or a particular person in an area, then we will try to reinforce, again, the general programs.
[00:23:52] Suzanne Usaj: And so it's very symbiotic and it kind of moves freely and openly. But we do hope and depend that our partners will be able to do a lot of that outreach so they can gain that trust and build that relationship early on.
[00:24:04] Kirk McConnell: What have you learned about how to be a client with these partners? You mentioned demanding.
[00:24:10] Kirk McConnell: I'm sure there's moments where you have to make your own luck. How have you learned to be a good client?
[00:24:16] Suzanne Usaj: Yeah, since I know how difficult it is, we talked early on about rolling up your sleeves. That phrase exists for a reason. It means it's not pretty, it's not easy. You're gonna get sweaty.
[00:24:28] Suzanne Usaj: Things will get a little bit messy, and I think really level setting and reminding everyone that we're all in it together. We would only ask things of a partner that we would do ourselves. We just don't always have the knowledge, capabilities, and scale to do that, and so it's not just a one time effort, it's just constantly building that relationship.
[00:24:48] Suzanne Usaj: We hope to do it more than every other year, but we do hold partner summits where we bring some key partners in that are focusing on those members. We put them all in a room and facilitate. We actually, in the most recent one, had them see our own employees. We had them do a tour of one of our plants, had them get to know the company in a couple different ways
[00:25:08] Suzanne Usaj: 'cause, you know, these avenues, like knowledge through a podcast is a really great format. Or being able to watch videos is really good for quick hit information or for knowledge base, but relationships, nothing replaces and can get in front of actually being in person together. So I think that mixed with having really good expectations and accountability and connecting throughout the year after that Partner Summit was another great add.
[00:25:32] Kirk McConnell: So that's kind of what I'll call that partner awareness and familiarity with each other. What are the other keys you've seen to actually make sure partners are working well operationally together?
[00:25:43] Suzanne Usaj: Since the metrics are very different between partners, right. Like I mentioned, I implied earlier that some partners, I hope that none of our employees ever have to use and
[00:25:53] Suzanne Usaj: none of our members ever, ever have to use. It's like, continually keep bringing up the cancer example. I wish that not a single person would've had to use that partner. So their metrics are that engagement is a percentage of the people that need them. Whereas another partner, we might expect them to reach almost everyone in the population.
[00:26:11] Suzanne Usaj: So really identifying and understanding what some key performance indicators are or the metrics are is maybe my first step. And then communicating that with each other and. I mentioned scalpel earlier. I like to be really precise, but instead of having other people figure it out, we kind of get into a room and problem solve and put people together that really need to be together.
[00:26:34] Suzanne Usaj: And maybe a, a great example of that is when we have a complex patient. With Collective Health, actually, we have Care Navigation as a partner, and so that care navigation team meets pretty regularly with our clinic because of organized healthcare arrangements, which are formal organizations set up. We have an organized healthcare arrangement with our clinics and our clinics are actually able to close the loop on the healthcare journey for a patient if they understand what the care navigation
[00:27:01] Suzanne Usaj: pharmacist, nurse, social worker, et cetera, what have they been talking about with them? And then that person might come in for a visit or our clinic might call them as well, and we wanna be able to help close that loop. So it's both in metrics and accountability. But I would say that also just getting those groups together to make sure that they're accountable for the patient and that they're working in the same way that a lot of the providers in the traditional healthcare system work has been a good model.
[00:27:26] Kirk McConnell: It sounds like you're doing a lot of really fascinating things with clinics. Tell us about the role that clinics play in your strategy and the relationship that they have or how do your members use those clinics?
[00:27:38] Suzanne Usaj: Yeah, thank you for asking. Our clinics are really special. That's why I am always excited to get to talk about them, and I think they're really special because I really firmly believe that maybe even 90/10, so 90% of healthcare challenges
[00:27:55] Suzanne Usaj: were just being able to get out in front and being able to help someone when they weren't really sure what they needed or before they even knew that they needed it. And so our clinics focus on that preventive, advanced primary care structure and model. And just really briefly to talk about what that means to us.
[00:28:13] Suzanne Usaj: The advanced primary care component that's a little bit more traditional, like a, you know, you'll walk in, there's the butcher tape on a chair and on a padded chair, and you'll get your blood pressure taken and your heart rate taken. That team is not only physician's assistants and MDs and doctors, but they also not only have nurses, health coaches, dieticians, so they have all that in more traditional healthcare setting.
[00:28:38] Suzanne Usaj: But if the member has maybe comorbid conditions or their chronic condition could benefit from talk with a therapist or talk with any behavioral health professional. We also have behavioral professionals, and then we also have physical conditioning and physical therapy with DPTs and trainers that will help people with pain management, for example, or non-surgical intervention.
[00:29:00] Suzanne Usaj: So these are all preventive measures and it's really built intentionally to ensure if someone is having a challenge, we can try to pull them back. But it tries to get in really early. I would say that our plan then has kind of copy pasted that into the plan. We do have completely free and more easily accessible behavioral health, and we try to make sure that that's integrated into people's care journeys.
[00:29:25] Suzanne Usaj: And we also do have to use a employee benefits term, MSK, or musculoskeletal partner. But I don't think that they're musculoskeletal in the traditional sense because you can actually go to them with any type of pain and then they will assess the right avenue. So almost all the partners on our traditional health plan side for people who don't have access to the clinics, has tried to replicate the successes of the clinics by making sure to remove all barriers, have health coaches and social workers as kind of the crux to really understand why someone might be limited in their success in the past.
[00:30:02] Kirk McConnell: So tell me a little bit more about the clinics. They're such a big part of your strategy. Are they created by you? Is it through a vendor? Is it a partnership in the community? How, how do they come to life?
[00:30:12] Suzanne Usaj: Yeah. They were born by Wonderful Company’s needs, so they are a captive group and they're called the Wonderful Wellness Centers, but they are a separate group of doctors that serve our employees and their family members.
[00:30:24] Suzanne Usaj: And they also, interestingly enough, we do support the community. There are separate clinics that also support schools and they're actually called Wonderful College Prep Academy. That is also a separate entity that our employees can use. The community can go to those schools. Very interesting how, you know, interconnected Wonderful Company is with the various wonderful entities in the Central Valley and a lot of those resources are, like I mentioned, very driven for the community that we are in.
[00:30:50] Suzanne Usaj: And we therefore have kind of, the community has joined us as a part of Wonderful Company, the employees.
[00:30:56] Kirk McConnell: One of the things that is so impressive to me is these initiatives you've put in place, but also recognizing how interconnected they all are. How do you think about plan design? Because I think plan design sometimes is where the friction comes from, between good ideas and blocked reality.
[00:31:14] Kirk McConnell: How do you think about plan design is an enabler of all these pieces?
[00:31:18] Suzanne Usaj: Yeah. I hope to always go back to that, what I mentioned earlier, making things really easy. Nothing is easy. Like I mentioned, if it was really easy, none of us would have any healthcare problems or at least chronic conditions. But if we can make things easier, by, I given the example earlier of if you're having a very serious specialty care situation where you may need a surgery, having maybe an inpatient hospital, stay through the broad network, be priced at a co-insurance that's much higher than an ambulatory surgery center.
[00:31:50] Suzanne Usaj: So driving people to places that are safer for them. And then also if we have a partnership, which Wonderful Company does with kind of direct contracting for higher quality providers, then that is completely free. So that's a specialty care situation, but we try to do the same for preventive care and almost all of our communications internally and
[00:32:09] Suzanne Usaj: culture of benefits and our Wonderful Rewards do echo this idea of getting out and doing the things that, you know, most plans do have, all plans, at least have true preventive care for free. We try to make everything that could fall into healthy decisions, preventive and proactive choices, completely free.
[00:32:29] Suzanne Usaj: And then that allows people, us then to build, like I mentioned this, supporting the social determinants of health, right? Like having health coaches providing those things proactively that aren't even in the plan design. It's just about the actual partners we work with. Having that wraparound, the members, not just employees, I think is even more important sometimes in the plan design itself.
[00:32:52] Kirk McConnell: What do you think comes next on all these pieces? Where's your brain going for the next two or three years of strategy?
[00:32:59] Suzanne Usaj: Yeah, I mean, I talk, we've talked a lot today about empowering people, the members themselves, to be able to make things easier for them, incentivize them to make better choices. But I honestly don't think that healthcare
[00:33:13] Suzanne Usaj: is just about people making poor decisions, right? We didn't get to this place by just all of us not doing the right things. I think our healthcare system could benefit from that rolling up the sleeves we talked about earlier. And so in the next couple years and the things that we've already gotten onto, I think about two years ago, we started getting upstream and working a lot more.
[00:33:35] Suzanne Usaj: I said direct contracting, but expand that even into like verifying and checking some of the payment integrity partners that can help review claims and make sure people are at the right care at the right time, and that would actually be influencing the healthcare providers and the healthcare market differently and being able to pay for the right types of care.
[00:33:57] Suzanne Usaj: I would say primary care is an area that we want to invest more heavily in and that those are intentional steps that we're taking with either community partners, so like ones that aren't our clinics. Or just creating structures where we are not only promoting people, go to it, that's the choice, but also then building a place where we can, altogether not just Wonderful Company, but other companies joining to be able to invest and infuse more money into that by pulling money away from places that maybe is not appropriate or hasn't been verified as like a just price for something.
[00:34:33] Kirk McConnell: When you think about the healthcare system writ large, are you feeling more optimistic or more pessimistic about where it's going?
[00:34:41] Suzanne Usaj: To use California as an example about why I feel optimistic. California, like other states, but there are smaller states, has recently passed a law to help ensure that healthcare is affordable, which is just a nice way of saying tamp down on the things that are escalating costs without increasing or improving outcomes and
[00:35:03] Suzanne Usaj: to be able to do that in other states that have been successful. But California being basically, you know, one of the largest economies in the world, not just because of the successes that the state has had, but also because of how many people are here. I think being able to change and move that needle over the last few years, and that's an advisory committee I sit on, so I've gotten to see it from the inside, but those are all publicly available documents and I would urge anybody that's in the industry to kind of tap into some of those
[00:35:30] Suzanne Usaj: documents and watch what's happening on the hill. A lot of people that never really cared or never knew how to care about the healthcare system beyond their own personal situations like your Senator or Congress person, those people are now fighting a lot more and trying to change the system a lot. So I think we're at this great apex where
[00:35:49] Suzanne Usaj: for all the people like myself, since I know a lot of my peers and admire them a lot for rolling up their sleeves as well. I think a lot of those people have really tried to use this kind of apex point to tip us in the right direction.
[00:36:00] Kirk McConnell: Do you feel like that means power is shifting from Goliath to David just a little bit?
[00:36:06] Suzanne Usaj: Since that one was a fight as opposed to a power shift, I'd hope that, I hope that your analogy maybe is better than mine, that the, it’s not gonna go fast. So yes, I think that the power is shifting and I hope that the right side of the fight comes out in the end, but we will all keep fighting regardless.
[00:36:23] Suzanne Usaj: The fight just keeps changing, and that's what I think makes it interesting.
[00:36:26] Kirk McConnell: Well, Suzanne, you mentioned how important it is to listen and work with your peers. If people want to follow up with you, how can they get a hold of you?
[00:36:34] Suzanne Usaj: Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn at Suzanne Usaj and I have tried to form a group of people there that can always get together, so I'm never shy.
[00:36:42] Suzanne Usaj: Please reach out to me to anyone who has questions and you can also visit csr.wonderful.com to learn more about some of the things where I mentioned our plan and clinics have had success together as well.
[00:36:53] Kirk McConnell: Thank you also just for you and your team rolling up your sleeves, working outside the system, and really doing so much to keep healthcare and your population moving forward.
[00:37:03] Suzanne Usaj: Yeah, I'm really honored to have joined. So thank you, Kirk, to you and the Collective Health team.