UnitedHealth Group’s fast-growing Optum
healthcare services unit is rolling out what it hopes will be a “city-by-city”
effort to make medical care more seamless to patients.
Andrew Witty,
the president of UnitedHealth Group and CEO of Optum said Wednesday evening at
the 2019 Forbes Healthcare Summit that the hundreds of clinics, surgery centers
and urgent care assets the company has acquired will increasingly be “wired
together” in markets across the U.S. The company has identified 10 markets
where that process is underway including Denver, Seattle, Southern California,
Las Vegas, Dallas and the New York and New Jersey metropolitan market.
While UnitedHealth continues to be the
nation’s largest health insurance company, selling commercial, Medicaid and
Medicare Advantage plans, its finding growth on the medical care provider side
of the healthcare system. Optum owns one of the nation’s largest pharmacy
benefit managers in OptumRx as well as an array of medical care provider
businesses, including doctor practices, surgery centers and urgent care sites
across the country.
“(We are) bringing together all of the
elements of Optum in an ecosystem at the local level,” Witty, who is CEO of
Optum and was recently promoted to president of UnitedHealth Group, told Moira
Forbes in a special fireside chat Wednesday evening at the annual Forbes Healthcare Summit at the Jazz at Lincoln Center in
New York.
Optum is the largest owner and operator of
doctor practices with more than 45,000 physicians either employed or contracted
to work for the company. With those doctors, clinics and other provider asssets
under the Optum umbrella, Witty said the company wants to increasingly “wire
them together” and provide them with health data and related insights to
improve patient outcomes across the country.
Witty said Optum will be able to provide
physicians “advice” so they have better access to innovation. “We can smooth
out the time it takes for the patient to get the care they need” from primary
care doctors and the specialists they are referring to, Witty told attendees at
the Forbes Healthcare Summit.
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