News Briefs

✦ Three years after they unveiled a joint venture tasked with lowering the cost and improving the quality of employee health care, Amazon, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Berkshire Hathaway are disbanding the company called Haven. CNBC broke the news on Jan. 4, citing people with direct knowledge of the fact that Haven employees were being informed that the venture will shut down by the end of February. The news outlet noted that many of Haven’s 57 workers were expected to be divided among the venture’s three founding companies. In May, Haven CEO Atul Gawande, M.D., stepped down from managing the nonprofit venture. “At the time the JV was formed in early 2018, there was much fanfare and significant stock impact to the managed care sector” (HPW 2/5/18, p. 1) amid concerns that Haven would disrupt the current system, Citi analyst Ralph Giacobbe advised investors in a Jan. 6 note. “In retrospect, the Haven disbanding isn’t overly surprising after three years without any major announcements or apparent breakthroughs in lower healthcare costs and improving outcomes.” Read more at https://cnb.cx/35iClU7.

✦ Regence, a Blue Cross and Blue Shield plan serving Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Washington, and MultiCare Connected Care, an accountable care organization owned by MultiCare Health System, unveiled a “first-in-the-nation” value-based model on Dec. 23. The model is unique because it uses a national interoperability standard to share member attrition data, which the organizations say will reduce the data-management burden on providers. The use of the standard also “establishes a foundation for the development of future population data interoperability applications, such as the exchange of data for measuring care quality and outcomes,” the companies noted in a press release. Read more at https://bit.ly/2XmqFuU.

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