Let your passion shine: A Q&A with Bryce Heinbaugh

How did you get your start in the benefits industry?

Oddly enough, this is all I’ve ever done in my professional adult career. At the age of 22, during my final semester of undergrad, I found out I needed to have emergency open heart surgery. As I went through the recovery process, I began to try to solve the problem of how I could acquire health insurance as an “uninsurable” individual. Exactly 363 days later, I started a health insurance agency. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I figured, “I have a personal example, I have credibility having gone through this, and I think I can help small businesses in this space.” Those first few years were not easy. It was very difficult to cold call and knock on doors. A colleague suggested I enroll in a health care MBA program at a university in Cleveland. He said, “I understand you’re self-employed and not interested in climbing the corporate ladder, but this isn’t necessarily about the education; it’s about the handshakes and the social capital you don’t currently have.”

I thought about it for a few weeks and decided to enroll. It was an executive MBA program, so every other weekend, you spend the night on campus and eat your meals with other professionals. We had physicians, hospital leaders, clinicians, but I was the only one in the class who represented payers, so I provided a different perspective on things.

While I was in the program, I shook the hand of a man who owned an independent third-party administrator in Ohio called JP Farley Corporation, and that handshake was the social capital that I needed. His name is Jim Farley, and he took me under his wing. He’s now 73 years old and has been in the business a long time. He said, “Bryce, I’ll show you everything you need to know.” And that’s where the real meaningful work began for me.

How did those early years shape your journey and where you are today?

Jim and I started to do a little self-funded work together, but I didn’t land my first self-funded case until nearly five years later. It’s a different space when you get into employers with over 100 lives; you’re talking to the C-suite, so it’s a different language. It took me a while, but I eventually landed that first one, and then my second one happened to be a client called Great Lakes Auto Group.

That was around the same time as the onset of the Health Rosetta movement, and Dave Chase started accrediting advisors to be part of the program. On the application, they wanted to see some real life experiences and outcomes. In my application, I mentioned this auto group and how, at that time, we had saved them something like 44% and $4M on their spend. That got me in the door at Health Rosetta and that’s where my “aha” moment happened. The Health Rosetta folks and their publicist used that case study and in January of 2019, Automotive News picked it up. When that happened, the floodgate of my business opened and everything changed.

I started to become an auto and trucking industry expert when it comes to health care benefits, and Health Rosetta started to turn to us to help others understand the process and begin to replicate it.

A lot of auto dealerships are very cut-throat and focused on the bottom line, so it’s not always about the people or making a meaningful impact for communities and households. But over time, we found a group of people in that industry who were like-minded and shared the same values and we started doing business together.

I’m located on Lake Erie in Ashtabula County, so we started doing a lot of work in northeast Ohio. I also started to use Dave Chase’s first book, “The CEO’s Guide To Restoring The American Dream.” I found a case study in there on Alleghany County Schools and how they took back health care from a huge hospital that is the biggest non-governmental employer in all of Pennsylvania by focusing on quality. I also became focused on interviewing other groups who had found success, like the Pittsburgh Group On Health. In late 2018, I picked up an article in Harvard Business Review that I still reference all the time. It talked about how, if self-funded employers would adopt nurse navigators to help patients by shepherding and guiding them through the health care process, self-funded employers could save over $5 billion a year, while also getting patients to the right providers.

And how does that concierge philosophy play into your strategies?

As all of this started to unfold and explode for us on the consulting side of our business, we started a separate clinical side called Concierge Nurse Navigators. I had two burnt-out nurses from the hospital side working for me in a different capacity and one day I said, “We’re going to make a shift. I realize this is going to be new and bumpy and I don’t know exactly how we’ll do it, but I’d like to help you both become nurse navigators and help patient populations navigate through complex decisions and find the highest quality care.”

I also recruited my business partner, who was an RN and most recently the head of quality for the entire transplant department at an academic hospital system in Cleveland. I said, “You’ll have to have faith and trust me” and she left this great career to join me. She’s now my COO and business partner, and runs our nurse care navigation entity, which is embedded 100% in every health plan we advise on. It’s a key ingredient in our recipe. We started scaling this over and over in Ashtabula County and we landed the largest public school district, a few manufacturers and some other public entities. All of a sudden, we had started what Dave Chase today calls a “community owned health plan.” All on the same recipe, using the same ingredients: advanced primary care incorporating a local independent pharmacy; our nurse navigators; and a direct primary care doctor. We started doing it in our county, but whenever we get calls from other places around the country, we look at it the same way. Other advisors started calling on me and Casey, my COO, to help them replicate the model and implement it in their own markets. Today, we’ve expanded into 17 states.

It’s crazy how much things have grown. It’s 10X what we thought we could do. It’s a blessing, because what we’re doing has nothing to do with the money we’re making — I haven’t given myself a raise in three years. We’re scaling this over and over and every time we land a client, we reinvest the money and find another dynamic nurse who is a problem solver and critical thinker.

How are conversations about change and innovation going right now with clients and prospects? Has recent turmoil made employers more or less open?

When you go to make these types of changes on a health care plan, it’s critical to win the hearts and minds of the population you’re serving, so they’re engaged, accept the idea and want this new and innovative way of seeing the health care industry and understanding how benefits can be delivered.

Emotional intelligence is my number one goal. We take a concierge nurse, myself or my business partner, a direct primary care doctor and we go and meet everyone face to face. That way, we can help them understand the importance of this battle against a health care system that has harmed Americans and caused bankruptcies, homelessness, and the opioid epidemic. We tell them how they’ve been taken advantage of, how the industry has preyed on them, and how we can help them and their families.

It was very hard in the beginning. When anything new comes to the market, even Elon Musk and the EV movement, the first adopters are the battlefield. It may or may not work, but we’re going to try it. It may flop and it’s usually very difficult to get it across the finish line. But now that we have all of these proven outcomes and lots of data and evidence about what we do, we’re able to share that openly. To us, the more employers that do this, the greater the systemic change that will happen across the country. We’ll say, “This is exactly how we do it.” We often take photos and show who we’re working with — fire departments, police stations, sanitary workers, teachers, and unions. Many people say, “Oh they’re going to push back” or “Their union is going to file a grievance” but we have yet to have it happen a single time.

Patients’ rights advocates and other organizations have sent film crews behind us and made mini-documentaries. We won an award recently for helping a very underserved population in West Virginia. Patients’ lives were changed due to cancer misdiagnoses and other things. It’s much easier now. If anyone pushes back, I usually just need a few minutes to answer their worries and concerns.

Any other areas of innovation or strategies you are watching right now?

The most meaningful areas for us are direct contracting and value based arrangements, whether that’s primary care, specialty care, or preventative care through a local therapist or orthopedist. I think that’s where we should all be focused.

A few months ago, our local county commissioners appointed me to our county health department board of directors. I’m the black sheep, the only non-status quo thinker on the board. They’ve been working on a new strategic plan for the health improvement of our county’s population. Our county is semi-rural, and a lot of folks have low health care IQs and low access to quality care. Some don’t even have internet access in their homes. And like other areas, we have many social determinant challenges. I sat on this week’s call and I heard a lot of different fee-for-service solutions from government agencies and hospitals. I finally got fed up with all the status quo answers and decided to speak up. I probably riled the crowd up, but I said, “We have to start thinking about things differently. We’re spending 80% of our money on waste in health care and yet we don’t drive better health outcomes. Why aren’t we looking at patient navigation and value based primary care, rather than running patients through the mill with fee-for-service?”

I also brought up the importance of continuing to focus on value based arrangements for the working middle class and poor in our communities and navigating them to higher quality and better health outcomes. There was an NPR podcast earlier this year that talked about the state of Delaware cutting back cancer mortality rates significantly through patient navigation with their underserved populations. That’s what it’s about: Helping people get preventative care and access to medical supplies.

How can the industry do a better job of attracting new talent, while becoming more diverse and bringing in young people?

Every ounce of talent that we’ve acquired for our team has come through non-traditional methods, whether they’re clinicians or hospital executives whose purpose has been taken away.

I hired an account manager who spent 29 years at an ESOP as the HR manager and assistant controller. I said, “Hey, do you want to come do something that’s meaningful?” We hired her earlier this year.

We had the same conversation with a superintendent of an inner city school district. He’s leaving his role at the end of this month, with three years left on his contract, and joining our team as our public entity senior consultant for unions and schools. He said, “I am going to have a greater impact doing this than I’ve ever been able to have during my career.”

I’m looking for folks who are dynamic in their own space or way, who are looking to lay their heads down at night feeling good about their purpose and the work they’re doing.

We recently had a nursing team in West Virginia at the largest saw mill in the U.S. When they returned, they said, “It was all we could do to hold back the employees’ tears; there were three or four who couldn’t even read or write, let alone get the care they need.” That’s what I love. The working poor and working middle class are the people that health care preys on, so it’s so satisfying to help them.

The two most important days in a person’s life are the day they’re born and the day they figure out why. And I’ve figured out why.

Finish this sentence: The key to success in this industry going forward is…

Finding your purpose. Once you do, let your passion shine.