Description: The passage is mainly talking about the healthcare first login, it shows how David Contorno helps the employers to manage their health care cost in different ways.
Have you ever gone into a restaurant and seen no prices on the menu? If you had, would you order anything off that menu? Most people wouldn’t take the risk of some ridiculously high priced steak coming to them, but we do it in health care all the time and afterwards, we get bills stacks of bills for tens and tens of thousands of dollars sometimes.
My name is David Contorno and I’ve been helping employers to manage their health care costs for the last 20 years. What if we approached health care in a completely different way? What if we applied the same cost and quality metrics to health care that we apply everywhere else?
Join me on my journey, as I seek to find solutions to my own hernia and the surgical repair that my doctor told me. I needed to get that fixed. I decided to make this experiment to let me find out what it’s like to go for that normal patient experience into the normal healthcare system.
I’m going to call some places and my main goal is to find out how often they do a hernia repair, how well they do it and what the cost is and you go on this journey with me. My name is David Contorno and my doctor diagnosed me with an inguinal hernia. I am trying to get the price for doing an inguinal hernia repair, as my doctor diagnosed me with an inguinal hernia.
I want to find out how often you do that type of repair, how well you do it and how much it costs. I start out pride. This is so ridiculously complex, your call is very important to us, please hold it, can you transmit anesthesia first, this whole process is archaic, don’t you agree?
It would be like that, if I wanted to get a price on a TV and I called Best Buy and they said here’s the TV price, but you got a call somewhere else that they got their price on remote control and somewhere else see the price on the electrical cable, you need to plug in. Do you agree?
Thank you for only three direct help, how can I help you. My name is David Contour, now my man, and one of the solutions that we bring to our clients is a company called Redirect Health and Redirect Health’s entire premise is that when you have somebody who has a clinical background on your side navigating you through the system ,your outcomes will be better and your costs will be lower across the board.
So what we do is to work with our internal referral team and our medical director and it could be a 24 hour turnaround time to give you a call back to get you those pricing that sounds good. So after hearing back from Redirect Health, they presented me with several options, all of which had published quality and pricing data they were able to give me.
I chose surgery center of Oklahoma because of its pricing and long-time documented history of high quality outcomes. Even though it was in another city, it still made sense for me to consider that as an option.
My name is David Contorno and I have an inguinal hernia on the right side of my groin that I need repaired. I want to get some ideas around cost, having that repair to your facility and he said that the price of an inguinal hernia repair ourselves paid for is 3060 dollars that includes the surgeon facility and anesthesiologist.
I mean we’ve been getting to call separate places to get that, so you already know what all those are going to be in advance and the question that I can ask about frequency and quality. stuff there might track of that whether you want to try to get you over there to her, if you don’t mind.
Hi David Seaman, this is Marilyn from the surgery center of Oklahoma. You called that one some stats yes. I think the three questions that if we’ve had any infections, the answer is no. For Angulo Hernias, there have been no readmissions for complications and we’ve done from December of 16 to November of 17 which is a year.
We did 313 hernia repairs, that’s impressive and awesome. I think that’s good and thanks so much. So I got some cash out at the ATM machine. I’m at the airport and I’m now paying for my surgery in cash. I paid the $200 over at the doctor’s office, which was a part of his payment. Now I’m arriving at the surgery center of Oklahoma.
I’m going to walk in and see what this intake experience is like and how it goes. I think it’s time for the buyers of healthcare. They begin to ask very serious question that if the big discounts off of bill charges make sense which has been a disaster, as Dave chase’ said, it’s possibly the biggest heist in the history of this country.
So having finished the surgery, I’m still a little groggy from the anesthesia, but everything seems to have been done well. I mean high-quality drugs they gave kept me out, but I woke up, and it was done well. Everything seems to have been a success.
So I’m four weeks post-op and I feel fantastic. I already went skiing two weeks ago and the experience was wonderful, the facility was of high quality, the nurses and the doctors and the staff were second to none and so what was different about this journey? How did this change fundamentally both the approach and the outcome from the standard experience?
I put healthcare first and I cared about cost and quality. I demanded it and didn’t go to a place that couldn’t give me those metrics, so I made sure that I was going to the highest quality and lowest cost facility that I could.
So let’s do the math well, I could have gone to the $47,000 place and I have a $12,000 deductible and out-of-pocket on my family high deductible health plan, so I would have owed the 12,000 and my health plan would have paid 35,000 on top of that, and maybe I would have had the same outcome.
Maybe I wouldn’t, but instead by putting health care first. I paid three thousand sixty dollars adding in travel and hotels and I’m still under four thousand dollars and I am sitting here before you 100% recovered and ready to do this the next time I need to encounter our healthcare system. So join me on this revolution one in which we put health care first and see how it changes your financial and your physical picture.