JPMorgan's Health Care Reboot Ditches Disruption for Insiders

by Peter Johnson

JPMorgan Chase Co. has revamped its troubled effort to become a major player in health care by taking an insider approach and staffing its new venture, Morgan Health, with career health care executives — a move that comes after the firm initially positioned itself as a disruptor with its flashy Haven joint venture alongside Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway. Morgan Health will instead focus on "improving employer-sponsored healthcare," per its website, through an emphasis on primary care and capitated reimbursement, while building on JPMorgan's existing relationships with Cigna Corp. and CVS Health Corp.'s Aetna.

Morgan Health focuses on employer-sponsored healthcare:

• Beyond the goal of reducing JPMorgan's health care costs, Morgan Health will eventually sell analytics, benefit design and care coordination insights and a capitated reimbursement model to other employer plan sponsors.
• "This emanates from the view that employer-sponsored health care needs to be better in the United States, and that there are substantial opportunities to improve quality, mitigate the rise in cost for employees and achieve health equity," says CEO Dan Mendelson.
• To start, Mendelson says Morgan Health will focus on Columbus, Ohio; Plano, Texas; and Wilmington, Delaware. Eventually Morgan Health programs could touch all of JP Morgan's 285,000 employees nationally.
• As far as other geographies and the $250 million venture fund are concerned, "our view is that incentives [between payer and provider] need to be aligned, and there needs to be enthusiastic participation by providers. We will not go into geographies where we don’t believe we can accomplish those two objectives," Mendelson says.

What does an industry expert say about the venture?

• "I think it's exciting that there's some dollars that are going to be made available for primary care innovation," says Ann Greiner, president and CEO of the Primary Care Collaborative. Greiner viewed a Sept. 20 panel hosted by the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy in which Mendelson discussed Morgan Health's plans.
• Greiner was "intrigued by [Mendelson's] comment that [Morgan Health] want to share their learnings. Because that's one thing we don't see a lot of….On the private side…we don't have much in the peer-reviewed literature about what's happening in the private sector."
• Greiner thinks that Morgan Health can differentiate itself from benefits consultants by coming up with "a set of measures so we can compare one employer to another."

From Health Plan Weekly