- We are a team that has worked together, successfully, launching multiple start-ups in this field. One grew to become a Fortune 500 managed care company, one new customer at a time. Another created products like what we are building at OxBridge. Another became the largest health care bundled payments company in the U.S.
- We expect our culture will benefit from decades of collaboration and the mutual trust that generates. We wouldn’t be working together, again, if we didn’t believe in each other.
- We are still building our team and if you are someone who believes you can contribute to our success, we’d love to talk.
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Members of the Oxbridge founding team trace their history to the conception and founding of Oxford Health Plans, which was one of the fasting growing health plans in the history of managed care. Oxford was a start-up that built HMOs in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Illinois.
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During the time Oxbridge team members were leading Oxford, it grew to become the 267th largest U.S. company, one of the fastest growing companies on NASDAQ and had over 2 million enrolled members. During our time building Oxford, we launched the largest bundled payment program ever attempted, creating Oxford Specialty Management, a subsidiary that defined episodes of care, recruited a network of health care providers into bundled payment arrangements, and integrated bundled payments into a commercial health insurance plan.
- This experience taught us many invaluable lessons about how to organize, deliver and finance health care in the same way it is experienced by a patient: at the episode of care level. Oxford was eventually sold to United Health for $4.9billion.
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The same team that is developing Oxbridge created an almost identical product, launching an earlier version of Episode Benefit Plans into the employer market. HealthMarket grew to 40,000 enrolled members during 18 months of marketing.
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The HealthMarket experience proved that employers were highly receptive and that beneficiaries seldom exceeded episode allowances when they understood the financial implications. We also learned how to stitch together the administrative, underwriting, marketing, and sales functions to deliver our innovative product. We created and priced the episode definitions that underpin the contracts, risk and administration of these new programs.
- Most importantly, as it turned out, we learned about each other and built relationships that now span Oxford Health Plans, Remedy Partners and now….Oxbridge
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On March 23rd of 2010, the Accountable Care Act(Obamacare) was enacted into law. The new law included the creation of a bundled payment demonstration project serving Medicare beneficiaries. Remedy was formed to recruit hospitals and physician groups into the Medicare Bundled Payment Program. Remedy developed workflow software, data analytics capabilities and support services for the hundreds of hospitals and physician groups who Remedy served.
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Remedy became the dominant force in this Medicare initiative, growing spending under management’ to over $7 billion and generating savings to Medicare of over $150 million annually. The business was eventually merged into Signify Health with the Remedy shareholders receiving a 45% stake in Signify. Signify recently entered into agreements to be sold to CVS at a value exceeding $8 billion.
- Providers were highly attracted to bundled payments generally and the Remedy program specifically. The Remedy experience provided immense domain insights into the needs of health care providers in bundled payment arrangements and the challenges of administering those programs. Each provider in Remedy’s Medicare program was a ‘Partner’, sharing responsibility, risk and reward. This is a model we are replicating at Oxbridge as we develop our proprietary bundled payment network.
We Founded Three Companies In This Field
- We Know The Inconvenient Truth
- We believe that bundled payments are the most effective payment model in health care – because we have tried them all!
- Population health doesn’t fit very well with employer sponsored health benefits. Employees and their families want choice. Especially when faced with an ailment that threatens their life, or the quality of life they can hope to lead. They certainly don’t want to be limited to a narrow network of health care providers who are operating under a capitated payment. The incentives are simply misaligned.
- Population health models are also encouraging the consolidation of hospitals, physicians, and smaller provider organizations into behemoth health systems. Virtually all measures of this consolidation phenomenon indicate that it has increased costs and not improved quality.
- Our experience shows that Episode Benefit Plans encourage greater freedom of choice, lower costs and demonstrable improvements in the quality of care. Equally important, these plans promote innovation because the focus is on improving the delivery of care in a specific episode. Physicians are not trained to manage populations. They are trained to be good at a handful of episodes that dominate their profession. At that level, they know where savings are possible and what drives improved outcomes. They are willing to enter into contracts with warranties because they understand the risks when measured at the episode level.
- Episode Benefit Plans introduce understandable new concepts to beneficiaries and health care providers, without removing freedom of choice. And employers are able to design incentives that reward engagement of their employees in how to lower costs, rather than presuming a giant health system will do it for them.