Refreshing Others to be Refreshed (ft. Aric Sharp)

Thanks for tuning to Digital Voices Podcast, where we chat digital transformation, challenges, and opportunities across healthcare and life sciences. And now, your host, Ed Marx.

Hey, it's Ed. Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. I know there's a lot of different podcasts you can listen to. You've chosen to listen to us, and I thank you. And today our guest is Eric Sharp. Eric is the Chief Executive Officer, Value-Based Care at Clover Health. Eric, welcome to Digital Voices.

Hey, great to be here with you today.

I know what the awesome thing is, is Eric and I actually are friends and we've known each other for quite some time. So it's always fun when it's a friend on Digital Voices. So I'm, I'm really looking forward to this, Eric, and it's great also to reconnect. So. As I mentioned, we've known each other for a little while. I think we first met when you were at Entegris and you'll talk about this maybe a little bit later in terms of your profession and, and, and where you've been and how you got to where you are. But you were the chief transformation officer and we got to work together on some pretty clever things, some pretty transformative type of initiatives. And then during COVID and all the stuff and the great things that you all did. at Integrus to really take care of your patients and the communities that you serve. It was pretty cool, but that's, that's really the context of our relationship. And then we, we definitely, uh, have a kinship outside of that in terms of our common faith, our shared faith, and just different values that we have. So always good to reconnect. But Eric, people want to know less about how I know you and more about what's on your playlist. What kind of music do you like to listen to?

There's not, there's actually not a lot there, Ed. Um, I love '80s music, so I can pull those things up pretty quickly. I would say the most recent add was a song called Good Day by Forrest Frank. Never listened to any of his music before. I put it at the beginning of my workout playlist and it's just kind of, you know, a good way to kick off the day. It's about having a good day. So.

Yeah. And you have a musician in your family too, right? I do.

Our daughter is a very talented musician. And she uses that skill in her occupation and it's been really fun to see her grow over the years and gain confidence. So she's done a lot of professional training, so it's a fun part of our family.

Yeah, that's very cool. What about life message or mantra? Are there words that you live by, things that inspire you every day?

Yeah, you know, I, there's a proverb that I really like and it It says, whoever refreshes others will be refreshed. I used that actually in a keynote recently at a conference, and it's really, it's about serving people and just doing good. And when you do that and you serve others, oftentimes we just get more out of it than the other person does, and it inspires us. And so that's been just something that's very top of mind for me in interactions is to serve other people. And You know, it sort of boomerangs back. It inspires you, it encourages you. And I, at least for me personally, I gain energy from that.

I love that. I'm going to, I'm going to look that up specifically and put it in the show notes. And we do have a playlist that's going, that's being developed currently of everyone's sort of life messages and mantras. And that certainly will be one of the key ones. So let's talk a little bit more about you. We obviously know already that you have a daughter. But tell us about yourself. Like, where did you grow up and, you know, kind of what kind of led you to where you are today?

Yeah, I grew up in a really small rural town in Southeast Iowa. It's about 1,000 people. And like most kids probably do in small Iowa towns, you kind of grow up playing sports, you're doing summer jobs. I often turned those summer jobs into businesses. So there's sort of a rite of passage in Iowa that At least there was back when I was growing up, of everybody does detasseling, which for those that don't know what that is, you're literally walking the cornfield and pulling the tops out of every corn plant, at least all of the female rows. And so it's about 4 rows that you pull 'em out and then you leave one and you pull the next 4 out. Super hot work. But with an entrepreneurial mind, I learned how to do that one year and I'm like, hey, I want to be the guy that actually puts this together. So I hired my friends, I went and contracted directly with the seed corn companies and ended up running the crew. Same thing happened in college. I spent a year, I learned how to do roofing. I picked hot, dirty jobs. And once I sort of had some confidence of, I knew what I was doing, I literally hung my shingle out. Pun intended. And did a little advertising, started getting some jobs and put my friends to work and helped me get through school, which is when I met my wife, Amy. She's wonderful. We've been married now for 30 years. And we've got our daughter, got an older son who's going to get married in April. My daughter got married this past May, and then we have our youngest daughter who's 14, a freshman in high school.

Wow. Yeah, that's quite a story. What would you say is the one thing that is key to a long, successful, happy marriage?

Boy, you know, I would say it's communication and then my wife would probably tell you I'm not great at it. I think in our family, we're a family that's very centered on our faith. We, And so I think that binds us together. You know, like a lot of families, I think, try to do, we try to eat together. We try to have conversations together about life and what's going on in the world. You know, for my wife and I, it's about getting away from time to time. But really the last couple of decades, it's all been focused on raising our kids, the next generation, and now starting to send them out of the nest and You know, just preparing them for life. So that's a, it's like been a common chore for us.

Yeah, that, that's cool. And I, I think you're onto something with the shared meals because, you know, it's been easy over the last generation not to have shared meals for a wide variety of reasons. And I think it's still super, super critical ritual that we do that helps with the communication and helps with our families. So Eric, Corn husking or corn detasseling. Is that what it's called? Detasseling?

Detasseling.

Yeah. Okay. That's a new word for me. So I'm going to look that up. And then roofing. But here you are, you've made a career in healthcare. Was there a decisive moment that was like, hey, I really want to serve in healthcare?

You know, I kind of just got sucked into it. So when I was doing my undergraduate degree in finance at Iowa State University, I was able to land a research assistantship with a finance professor. And at the time, he, this had been back in the early '90s. He was researching healthcare benefits and the like. And so he gave me this sort of tedious task of cutting out and writing summaries on every healthcare reform article from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. And so I did this over the course of a year and it kind of drew me in. And then he helped arrange an internship at the local hospital in Ames, Iowa, Mary Greeley Medical Center, where I worked Under the CFO, and I really liked it, did a couple of projects. And so I decided to apply to the graduate program at the University of Iowa. So went from a Cyclone to being a Hawkeye, although I've always been a Hawkeye fan, and was accepted to the program. And, you know, I think really getting into healthcare, that was it. I was drawn into it and then went into full study and Got a break between my years of graduate school to get an internship with a startup called the Iowa Clinic, which is here in Des Moines. They were just forming and actually went in and met with the newly hired CEO and said, hey, I'm looking for an internship. I'll work for free. I need the experience. So I was immediately hired. I don't know if free is hired or not, but he ended up paying me, I think, after the first few projects and I ended up staying there for 11 years. And so it was a great opportunity to get my foot in the door.

That's sort of what led you, I'm assuming then, the whole value-based care, managed care, or payer side, if you will, healthcare.

It was, I spent the first, I would say, 18 years of my career with these large physician-owned medical groups. So there was a lot of focus on growth, on quality improvement, which I would say is really the precursor to value-based care, which I would really call value care. And that can come in many forms. But after I left the medical group side, I went into large not-for-profit health systems and was really charged with building a network, entering into value, formal value-based agreements. Developing population health strategies across these broad health systems that are very complex. And so those are just fascinating roles, both with UnityPoint and then with Integris, and learned a ton, but really just tried to push value care in a way that would lower the total cost and improve quality. And also with a focus on Yeah.

So I know at Clover Health, that's a lot of what you do. So let's talk a bit about Clover Health. For those who don't know, what, who is Clover Health?

Yeah, so Clover's been around for about 10 years or so. We became a publicly traded company a couple of years ago, about 2.5, 3 years ago. When I describe Clover to folks, I describe it really in 3 buckets. So in the first one, we have a Medicare Advantage plan that's very successful. It's primarily in New Jersey. There are also lives in Georgia, South Carolina, a couple of other states, about 80,000 lives in total. That's really the first bucket. It's the core of our business. We spend a lot of time and focus on it. The second bucket is really what we call Clover Care Services. And what that really means is a home care service where we have physicians and nurse practitioners that literally go into the homes of our most complex patients, our most complex members. So these are folks that are very polychronic, polypharmacy. There are a lot of social barriers to care, and we meet them where we are. And we deliver that care in a very compassionate way, but also very intentional way. To impact both the quality and the cost, and that's a very successful, very successful service. And then through all of that, we now have what we is really the third bucket, which we call it's organized in a subsidiary that we call Counterpart Health, where we take in the technology that has made us so successful in the other two buckets. Those providers use that technology. Our MA plan leverages that technology, makes it available to the physicians that are in the network that is serving our members, in particular primary care physicians. They use that technology at the point of care and it's been very successful. And so we have put in the subsidiary so we can take it out into the marketplace, which has really been my focus now, and making it available to other physicians that are in value-based care or plans that are trying to drive value-based care strategies forward, ACOs, clinically integrated networks. So it's really, Clover is really those 3 buckets. But if you had to sum it up into, you know, into a statement, it would be that we're trying to really improve every life that we interact with. And we're doing that by enabling physicians to provide the highest value care. Those are the things that get us up every day. The technology is very geared towards trying to help providers diagnose chronic disease earlier so that they can interact, they can begin to treat, intervene earlier. And that has a significant impact downstream on the outcome, the lifestyle, the total cost and quality of care for of the members there benefit from the physicians that are leveraging our technology. So we want to see that at scale.

Yeah.

Um, and that, uh, that's a, a really big opportunity for us. We're excited about it.

Yeah. Let, let's dig a little bit deeper into the last thing that you were saying, because Eric, that's what I appreciate about serving with you when you were at Integrus is not only are you a great leader and you understand the physician practice side and the value care side, But you're also a techie in a way. You have a good understanding of how technology can help and assist. And so you mentioned how, you know, with chronic disease specifically, can you give a couple examples of how this technology is helping manage or maybe identify chronic disease?

Yeah, I would love to. We have a white paper out that is very specific. We have a number of them out, but one that I'll just highlight here is specific to diabetes. And so what we're doing in our technology is we are harnessing 100+ sources of data. So EHR data, claims data, lab data, pharmacy data. We're going out to HIEs and getting transitions in care data and clinical pathway data. We're pulling all of that together, running a suite of AI algorithms many of which, well, they're all proprietary to us. We have patents on a good number of them. We're running these AI and machine learning algorithms to then present insights to physicians at the point of care. And what we're finding in the case of diabetes, we're able to isolate the data in a way where we can look at patients that have not previously been diagnosed with diabetes, And then we want to track them over time because we know some of them will be eventually. And we're able to track those physicians that are using our technology and those that are not. It's a great sort of A/B test. And what we're finding is that those that are using the technology are diagnosing diabetes significantly at a significantly higher rate than those that are not. That's interesting to us, but we, we go a step further and we want to understand, well, does that really affect the treatment pattern post-diagnosis. And it does, right? Because if you're diagnosed, the physician is going to treat. And so you can see intervention with medication immediately spike after that diagnosis, just like you would expect. And where those patients had not previously been getting prescriptions for diabetes drugs. And so that's great. You would expect that. But then we go even a step further and we want to understand, well, is it actually impacting That earlier diagnosis, that earlier treatment, is it impacting blood sugar control for a diabetic? Is it impacting outcomes? And what we're finding from the data, and this is, you know, a ton of data, this is not just like a sample of 20, these are, you know, thousands of patients. And what we're finding is that the— we're intervening about 3 years earlier because of that earlier diagnosis on these diabetic patients. And we very quickly see that blood sugar come under control, exactly what you would want to see. And that leads to less insulin use, less instances of hypo and hyperglycemia, all of the clinical things that you would want to see. So when we begin to see results like that, that's what gets really exciting to our clinicians and to our software engineering teams. And we have scores and scores of these folks. that are working on this just every day when they get up. And we just continue to build that out and continue to find more success stories in it. We found stories around CKD and other clinical areas. So we feel like we're doing something pretty special. I can remember back when I first started working on value-based care in earnest, which is probably A dozen years ago. And sitting around the table with folks, and you can appreciate this, where it's like, gosh, if we can just get our hands on the data, we will be able to solve everything. We'll be able to work upstream and prevent deterioration of health and all of these things. And I'll be honest, I think that's been pretty elusive for much of the industry. Lots of really earnest attempts. But I'm much lighter on the results. So really for one of the first times in my career, I'm finding that like we are really doing this and that is super exciting because there's so much potential and it feels like we're really just getting started.

Yeah. No, that is exciting. I'm even getting excited listening because you're right. We've talked about this potential for many years. And we've had, you know, maybe bits and pieces of a success, but you all are doing it at scale, leveraging the tech and really improving the health communities that you serve and, you know, attacking that cost and quality equation. So that's really cool. And not to make a commercial, but as a result of the great things that you all are doing with innovation and tech, I know that you've been invited along with myself At HIMSS 25, and we're going to do views from the top on innovation in the payer space. And I think I would guess that this is going to be one of the prime examples that is shared on stage. So that's really cool. So the tech is really needed, not, not just for the reasons that are obvious and you already shared, but there's a lot of headwinds going into MA and value care. Can you talk a little bit about the headwinds we're all facing there? And, and then maybe we'll, we'll bring it back to the tech a little bit and how that's helping.

Yeah, you know, I think value-based care is not easy. And I think it's been, it has been difficult. It takes a lot of investment of time and resources to be successful. And what's a little bit unfortunate is that there are a lot of headwinds right now. And so you're seeing some folks step back from some of their efforts and it's really showing up In particular in Medicare Advantage right now. And so if you just sort of read the payer press space, you're seeing some of the larger, particularly the publicly traded Medicare Advantage companies in their earnings releases, they're talking about utilization costs going up. And that obviously has an impact downstream. But at the same time, Legislatively, the Inflation Reduction Act was passed that has an impact on pharmaceutical coverage, and it ends up requiring the Medicare Advantage plan to bear more of that cost. And so where the government was picking up a disproportionate share of that, some of that is shifting back to the plan. And again, that has a downstream effect. And so what you're beginning to see now as we approach the annual enrollment period and bids have been filed and benefit plans are becoming public is you're seeing some changes in those benefit plans. I mean, you're seeing higher deductibles on some of the drug coverage. You're seeing some differences in copays and coinsurance. I think it's important for those that have Medicare Advantage plans to really take a close look at them this year. They don't want to be surprised if their plans are changing. From Clover's standpoint, our changes, I would say, are not as significant because despite all of these headwinds, we've been performing well.

Right.

We in large part attribute that to just what we do. It's our technology, it's our approach to the marketplace, it's our Clover Care Services in-home. And you've also got other changes going on. I mean, at a regulatory level, the way that The STAR metrics are measured has changed a little bit. The cut points are different. They've become a little bit more difficult. You've seen how illness burden is measured change going from V24 to V28. So it's not like there's just been one breeze of a headwind. There's a pretty strong jet stream of headwind, if you will, that has been coming and that is impacting. some MA plans pull out of markets. You're seeing some providers drop some of their Medicare Advantage contracts altogether. And you're seeing providers pull back from even taking risk in their value-based agreements. So my hope is that it's just a temporary setback and that both on the provider and the payer side, that over the long term here, people will continue to lean in earnestly into to value-based care and work in that direction. And just sometimes headwinds just force us to find new ways to sail the ship to get through them. We have our strategy and our approach. It's working. We're still seeing really good results. We're really proud of those, but I think others will also find ways. And if not, I think we are in a position to help them.

Yeah, no, that's great. And like you said, yeah, We have these headwinds or how you phrase it, maybe jet streams, and we can leverage, again, coming back to digital in the digital voices, but we can leverage technology to really fulfill the promise of digital transformation and help with these sort of things. Like you said, early detection leads to better treatment, better, faster treatment, better outcomes, and obviously it saves money. So it's kind of hitting that quintuple aim, if you will. So we talked a lot about Clover and I want to talk a little bit more about your role and leadership. And I think we kind of picked it up from you already, Eric, but what drives you daily and how do you end up at Clover and just what keeps you going there?

Yeah, I mean, for me, every day sort of getting up, it's the impact downstream that we can have on people. And that's really my leadership approach is very people-centric as well. We can get into that a bit. But what really drives me is there is so much opportunity to improve healthcare, right? And there are so many directions that we can go. I've always viewed it as it doesn't really matter if I'm with a payer or with a provider or with a tech company, or there's just opportunity to make things better. And that's what's driven me for much of my career, whether it's starting up an organization, turning around an organization, transforming an organization, population health. As you recall, back at Integris, we were working on Digital Front Door. At the same time, we were, you know, leading the charge on standing up Oklahoma's first virtual hospital-at-home program, which has been successful. Super fun project. So it is, I think there's a ton of opportunity here at Clover to continue to be innovative and to help pieces of the healthcare ecosystem just get better. And it takes leadership to do that, but at the core of it, it's about listening. It's about being really tuned in to try to understand stakeholder problems and then coming up with ways to solve those. And Not always does one size fit all in terms of solutions. I think it takes a certain nimbleness and approach. With technology, you can get pretty nimble and you can move pretty quickly, both in customization around technology solutions, but also even in your economic models that you place around those within partnerships. That's been a real fun part of of the role here, um, over the last year or so with Clover as we've begun to focus on taking our technology out into the marketplace.

Yeah, that's really cool. So all the things that your customers are benefiting from, your patients and their families and clinicians, you're now able to scale that outside of Clover and help other organizations that do the similar things to Clover, but do it more effectively. That's really cool. So you're kind of building a business within, uh, the business, if you will.

Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right.

Yeah, that's very cool. So let's talk about leadership. How did corn detasseling and roofing help prepare you for your current role?

Yeah, again, just growing up in a small farming agricultural community, I was surrounded by just a culture of hard work where people had a sense of ownership in what they were doing because every farmer is an entrepreneur really at heart, and they're taking risk in a very big way. And sometimes the crop produces and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes when it does produce, prices may not cooperate with you and it may not be the greatest of years. And so I attribute a lot of my leadership style to the community that I grew up in. And I would say that also You know, and I would say middle of my career, it's been a little while since I did some foreign missions work, but there was a period of a decade or so where I did a lot of foreign missions work, largely in what I think we would describe as third world countries and going in and working with a team of people to try to establish feeding centers and orphanages in different parts of the world. And when you can sort of anchor your perspective and your worldview on meeting needs sort of at the ground level, I just think that that can't not impact your leadership style approach, right?

Yeah.

You just have a bigger picture about what's truly important in life. And sometimes we can get wrapped up day to day in our careers and our titles and our successes and Being able to sort of look beyond that and have our really our personal identities attached to just serving people, I think is more critically important. And you know, we all know people who have burnt out in their career, and they've tried to climb a ladder, and and and then they've had you know maybe had points in that that journey where they've had to sort of recalibrate.

Yeah.

And go back and figure out what's really important. And so for me, it gets back to people and whether they're in rural communities like I grew up in, or whether they're in impoverished communities in different parts of the world that I've visited, or they're next door to where I live now, or it's through an avenue like healthcare of trying to serve people. I think a lot of that is just driven my leadership side, my leadership approach, where I think if people know that you care and they know that you hear them, they'll do what you want to work towards shared goals.

Yeah.

And as long as you're fair in that and you're setting reasonable expectations and you're providing room for failure and not always demanding everything to be perfect, That builds trust. And if there's something that's really scarce in the world today, it's probably trust.

Yeah.

You can just look at our culture here in America, and particularly when it's sort of high political season time, and trust is a little fleeting at times. And so I think if we have opportunities as leaders To really build trust, to almost make it synergistic in those that are around us.

Yeah, Eric, you're dropping a lot of great leadership points on us and some great wisdom. I really appreciate it. I think it's a great way to sort of wrap up. We talked about everything from your daughter's music and our playlists, and I love the proverb about refreshing others and you'll be refreshed. It's kind of a life mantra. And then, uh, we learned a little bit about the corn husking industry, how that works and, uh, the detasseling. But we talk a lot about just the way you grew up and what formed you as a leader. And then quite a bit, quite extensively over Clover and some of the different things that you do, especially when it comes with technology. Super fascinating because it's really making a difference. Talk about your role, impact on people, and, and then leadership. What did we miss? Or is there anything that you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word.

Well, I think it, I'd be remiss to not just mention the team at Clover. So when I look at all of the Cloverites that, you know, that are working every day toward, you know, our mission and vision and with our values, that team has evolved, I think, in very remarkable ways over the last few years that I've been with the company. We've managed to pull together technology expertise, healthcare subject matter expertise, public company experience. And there's so much synergy within the team right now that the sky is the limit. And I think also with that, we just have an outstanding board of directors. And so collectively, these are people with great experiences in healthcare and other companies. And so it's like we have all the right ingredients to do something really, really special. And it never comes down to a single person. It takes a lot of folks to row the boat in the right direction to really make impactful change. And I think we're doing it. I'm excited about the future for us at Clover. Just love what we're getting up and being able to do every day.

Yeah, I know. That's really cool. And Eric, again, it's so great to reconnect with you. You're a great person and great leader. And thank you for being part of Digital Voices.

You are most welcome. Thank you, Ed.

Hey, that wraps up another edition of Digital Voices. Thanks for listening.

Thank you for listening to Digital Voices podcast with Ed Marx. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your preferred streaming service and leave a rating and review. And most importantly, thanks again for listening.