Voices Interview with Galen Murdock, CEO

Veteran in health tech, Galen Murdock, discusses reshaping behavioral care with ShareMy.Health.

Behavioral Health Business: What career experiences do you most draw from in your role today?

Galen Murdock: I’ve spent over two decades of my career focused on creating software products now used by most hospitals, doctors, and pharmacies daily. Despite years of industry improvement, it’s still staggering to see the number of tools distracting patients and providers from practicing patient-centered care. Even though technology is essential to value-based care, we need to do more to promote lasting behavioral change and economic alignment.

Back in 2005, I believed technology alone would get us there. Fresh from building two large electronic health record platforms (EHRs), all I could see was the pain, waste and death resulting from paper records, paper prescriptions and inadequate technology standards. I spent several years promoting and implementing “meaningful use” standards in collaboration with industry and Department of Health leaders. We improved clinical documentation, decision support, medication workflow, allergy tracking, drug diversion, FDA medical devices and artificial intelligence.

As I matured I realized the importance of the economic side of health care – working to align the pocketbooks of value-based care stakeholders to achieve better health, lower costs, improved outcomes, happier clinicians and health equity. I redoubled my efforts to uncover the intrinsic motivators and financial incentives that drive primary care providers to provide better care and patients to become more accountable for their own well-being.

Mutually beneficial partnerships are vital. After crafting hundreds of partnerships, including many great ones, I believe we must become experts at empathetically tearing down regrettable boundaries around data and access to care and build sustainable bonds between organizations. We’ve got to do better at maturing from, “What’s in it for me?” to “How can we win together?”

ShareMy.Health has been shaped by these experiences. We strive to offer innovative solutions in mental well-being that are squarely aimed at changing the economic conversation for all stakeholders – especially the employer – while helping all partners succeed.

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Talk about ShareMy.Health’s solution and how it delivers value to each stakeholder in the care journey.

ShareMy.Health serves three value-based care audiences – employer, employee and provider. We provide one place to go for better engagement, self-care, and health measurement. Our clients are Fortune 1000 organizations. They’re professional sports teams, Olympic teams, and global employers and organizations. They trust us to keep sensitive information in our vault that can only be shared with the individual’s explicit approval.

Employers struggle with access to quality care – with promptly finding behavioral health professionals to care for their employees. When employers choose our subsidized, cash-pay network, they gain access to a wealth of providers who no longer accept insurance or EAP reimbursement. Our “bring-your-own-provider” model embraces qualified provider groups of any shape or size.

Privacy is another big struggle for employers and employees who fear exposing personal health information. Our team has spent decades in the trenches creating private and secure solutions for leading EHR and hospital software companies. Our HIPAA-compliant, consumer-directed platform gives control to the employee over who sees their personal data and for how long. We shield employers from identifiable information while still delivering key insights from anonymized aggregate data.

We help our users make lasting, personal connections. We foster healthier corporate culture by equipping corporate managers with the assessments, education and training materials they need to implement research-proven practices for the teams they serve. Each employee can invite their family and peers to collaborate in strictly private circles, share sensitive information and measures with their loved ones, and share what they choose with their behavioral health provider. These trusted circles of friends and family create supportive spaces where employees can set goals, be held accountable. and find support while implementing the positive changes needed for long-term personal growth and well-being.

Underneath it all, our platform gives employers, employees and providers a deeply integrated user experience. In a climate where many employers have buyer’s remorse with hundreds of point solutions, we increase employee engagement, data integration, and ROI for the software they’ve already purchased, like a rising tide. We can understand and express the correlations between depression and diabetes, overwork and obesity, anxiety, and absenteeism. Our AI-powered insights securely leverage data from all integrated partners to help employers spot and address gaps in care, employees learn what works for people like them, and therapists prepare for their next session in seconds.

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How can value-based care underpin behavioral health needs, and what role do behavioral health software platforms play in that equation?

When we create value for all stakeholders in the care journey, we are far more likely to build sustainable health and long-term, sustainable cash flow for our companies. Software must scale and reinforce sustainability. We can foster competition without excessive profit-taking. We can replace wasteful systems through patient-centered design. Of course, we need our free-market economy, but as I shared before we must infuse our business models with a more abundant, “How can we win together?” mindset.

That’s my favorite outcome of value-based care – it creates more value than we need to keep. We receive enough, and some to spare. We can give back as part of a sustainable, impactful business model instead of waiting to amass enough for a handout. We replace, “How can I?” with “How can I not?” I’d like to think that’s why we all entered health care in the first place.

What does such sustainability have to do with behavioral health? Everything. With sustainability our workplaces become healthier, our care delivery is streamlined, the underserved receive vital service and are strengthened in the service they give. Simply put, healthy behaviors yield behavioral health.

Software platforms must help behavioral health providers spend more of their time providing care. Therapists, for example, are often five to ten years behind a traditional provider when it comes to technology adoption. Back in 2005, 95% of MDs were still using paper. Today that’s flipped to over 95% of practices using EHRs. Yes, by using paper, many behavioral health providers have avoided their peers’ meaningful use regulatory pains, but they’re also missing out on an opportunity to spend even more time with their patients. They can leapfrog most of that pain by adopting value-based care software that automates the mundane while increasing provider-patient intimacy and connection.

Now in the workplace, consider the astonishing cost of depression and anxiety. The WHO recently reported that an estimated 12 billion working days are lost to depression and anxiety at a cost of US$1 trillion per year globally in lost productivity. If you run the numbers and adjust for GDP, that’s an average loss of over $2,500 per United States employee. Professional organizations with a higher median wage are losing $5,000 to $8,000 per employee, or up to $8M annually for a 1,000-person company.

What employer wouldn’t want to return some of that to the bottom line, not just as cost savings, but as improvements to individual wellbeing, engagement, retention, productivity, and company culture? Imagine the opportunity costs from dampened innovation and motivation. That’s a tremendous, unmeasured hit to a company’s top-line revenue as well.

So then we come back to the virtuous cycle of value-based care, where employers equipped with the right combination of culture, care, privacy and software – even if they’re just facilitating better access to behavioral health care – will radically impact their long-term, sustainable cash flow.

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Why is value-based care a necessary first step towards unburdening our behavioral health care system, and what is ShareMy.Health, specifically, doing to further support that initiative?

For 30 years, I’ve interviewed health care leaders about what’s broken in the behavioral health system. Integrated care is a dominant theme, namely merging medical and behavioral care together. After all, mental health is health. This unnatural separation is still far too common.

On a recent emergency visit to a flagship hospital, I was shocked that my loved one, if admitted, would basically receive a supervised sleepover at thousands of dollars per day instead of receiving the best behavioral health care our city has to offer. It’s tragic.

We must bring together employers, health plans and provider organizations to help fully integrate behavioral health care into health care. Only then will our culture’s stigma of major depressive disorder become as tiny as the stigma of nearsightedness.

The economic system of behavioral health is woefully broken. Traditional therapists are jumping through the hoops of cheap EAP rates and mediocre, CPT-hampered reimbursement to earn a fraction of what they can earn in cash. If an employer helps simplify the payment model, they seize a significant opportunity to unburden those clinicians and free up more of their time to provide care.

With ShareMy.Health, a self-insured employer can practice value-based care by drastically reducing the time for provider reimbursement, gaining access to a greater number of competent caregivers, increasing accountability and health of the employees receiving care, all while lowering their costs and increasing their overall commercial throughput. Employers have a major opportunity to win by leaning into the challenges of value-based care.

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What are some key steps organizations should take to support behavioral health value-based care journeys?

First, organizations need to increase their awareness. A remarkable amount of cultural change happens simply by increasing visibility and compassionately shining a light in dark corners. When you understand the prevalence of depression and anxiety within your organization, you can start to measure the consequences and begin to offset them. Top-down, company-wide training is vital, especially to strengthen each manager’s ability to foster a healthy culture in their teams.

Next, organizations should create just enough structure around solving their most important concerns. Let’s say their top concern is employee burnout among manufacturing production staff. By implementing a modular, value-based care platform like ShareMy.Health, they can establish a baseline and create a problem-centered flywheel like plan-do-study-adjust.

Then comes the harder part – staging experiences that foster transformation. There’s a wonderful book called The Experience Economy by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, which was updated again in 2020. The authors compellingly show that we transform our culture by customizing a set of meaningful experiences for our employees. For example, what personal transformations come from implementing a “buddy” system to advance healthy norms at work, as recommended by Dr. Richard Safeer? I love the question, “What is the pipeline of experiences we will customize for our teams in 2023?”

ShareMy.Health provides the center stage for these transformations – a unified experience for employees, employers, and providers to collaborate on one problem, one experience at a time. We help employers apply research-proven health care practices to accelerate value-based care.

Especially in a year of economic uncertainty, employers need to know which investments to stop, and which will make the biggest impact. This is precisely where ShareMy.Health helps them focus, preserving the impactful solutions, and increasing the impact through employee mental wellbeing.

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What does the future currently hold for ShareMy.Health?

It’s interesting to look first at our beginning. In 2018 our software helped locate medical records for guests of homeless shelters, informing medical treatment within minutes instead of the typical 9-10 days. The individual had full control of all data sharing through our consumer-directed exchange. As heartbreaking as the pandemic is, COVID created an opportunity to change the way in which health information flows, and how its secure exchange can economically benefit employers and employees.

We will keep serving Fortune 1000 employers and global organizations, and help them realize the gains from investing in employee wellbeing. We’ll remain steadfast in our protection of individual choice and privacy. We’ll bring more and more behavioral health providers into the world of employer value-based care.

We are excited for our new joint offerings in diabetes, obesity, sleep and medication adherence. There is a tremendous correlation between behavioral health and these widespread challenges. With more of the industry’s best partners, we will infuse mental well-being into their data, insights and recommendations to create a stronger whole. We’ll automate measurement-based care to help employers invest their limited funds in only those solutions that make an impact.

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Finish this sentence: “In the behavioral health industry, 2023 will be the year of…”

…employer value-based care.

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View the original article here.

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