Robert Laumeyer has enjoyed a fascinating career. An engineering veteran, he has many successes to his name, including more than 30 patents, his own start-up and several IPs sold to tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard.
Today he serves as CTO at Availity, a technology network expert supporting health plans, providers, and vendors.
Much of Robert’s work centers around finding ways to better connect payers and providers through healthcare services, connecting the dots with data wherever possible.
“Payers are very interesting,” he tells Fierce Healthcare’s Rebecca Willumson. “What I like about payers is they need to connect to providers and we really can help with that, reducing that abrasion. It's a two-way street.”
Robert goes on to discuss the abrasion that has hampered relationships between payers and providers over the years, and how the use of technology and data can help to overcome it. To really make progress, he says, every stakeholder must embrace change.
Want to hear more from Robert? Listen to the interview in full today.
Rebecca Willumson: Hi there. I'm Rebecca Willumson. I'm the publisher of Fierce Healthcare, and I'm here today with Robert Laumeyer, Chief Technology Officer at Availity. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Robert Laumeyer: Appreciate it. Thank you.
Rebecca Willumson: So before we begin, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and about Availity?
Robert Laumeyer: I've been in engineering my whole life and I've had a few successes, and I really enjoy the opportunity working at Availity because I'm really good at what I do, which is making systems, but I like to be able to help people and use the skills that I have to be able to help people and Availity lets me do that. And that's why I haven't retired. That's why I'm still working there. And I really enjoy that part of the job of being able to use my skills at moving data around and finding things in data that can help us, allowing us to help people. And that's a cool thing.
Rebecca Willumson: Very good. So moving into the questions. So where do you see the greatest opportunity working with payers?
Robert Laumeyer: Payers are very interesting. What I like about payers is they need to connect to providers and we really can help with that, reducing that abrasion. It's a two-way street. They're dependent on each other. They've had a lot of contention in their relationship over the years, and we're payer owned at Availity, so we speak a lot of payer, I started in the provider side, so I really understand that a lot. And I really think that ability to really work, reduce that abrasion down between them, making the systems better designed so that they can run faster and more elegantly and seamlessly is good for everybody, including the patients, which is what we should all be really focused on, is the patients. And that's why I'm in healthcare is to help the people, not to make the payers more money or the providers more money, but to get better healthcare for everyone.
And also at the same time, find those ways that the payers, they have this unique ability when you solve a problem for them, it's tens of thousands of solutions per day, right? And that's awesome. If you do it at a provider, it's tens and twenties and maybe a hundred things that you fix that day, but at a payer, it's that huge scale and that excites me. And that's, I think a really awesome thing about Availity is that we sit in that precipice between those two so often and they're used to working with us, and that enables us to really work with the payers and get them to alter how they do business in certain circumstances and change processes like we did with the AuthAI product. Being able to do an authorization in seconds, literally under a minute versus a couple of weeks. And that really helps the providers because then they're done with it, and they can move on.
Rebecca Willumson: So tell me, what do you need from a payer partner to really make that relationship work?
Robert Laumeyer: We need that person at the payer who's a little bit of a visionary who wants to be seen as a thought leader both in their company and in the industry as a whole, we're an AI application and both are very exciting and a little bit scary at the same time. That's the truth of the matter. And so you have to have that person who's willing to move forward. The other person who really fits our mold is those people who are really disappointed in their delegated vendors. They feel like they're too much of a black box. They don't know what's going on. They want more control. They want the data so that they can actually improve their network. Without the data, you really can't know very much about your network, but once you have that data, you can really start to see who's performing well, who's not.
That doesn't always match with what your conceptions are beforehand. And so those are the things that really make those payer people the right people to work with is that they have that desire to improve and a willingness to change. Change is hard. Nobody likes change, but we all have to do it and it can make us much stronger. The other thing I think that's interesting is the opportunity really to dramatically reduce the costs, the overhead costs, but also work on the denials. There are inappropriate denials being made in your name by a delegated vendor that's not good. And having the ability to bring that in-house and to control that process and to really understand when those are going to happen, I think is crucial to being able to move forward. And I like that we're able to enable payers to do this now, and that's really what we find the most exciting.
Any change when you put in a new system at a payer requires a certain level of commitment from the payer also, they need to have a good business case upfront and they need to understand how long it's going to take. It's not a long process, but it does touch a lot of parts of their business. One of the interesting things is that we actually work closely with the Chief Medical Officer's office at payers, which is not normal for an IT group. And we find that that's both exciting for the CMO, but also a little odd because the CMO is now working with networking requirements and those kinds of things. That's another of the things that we really find at the payers, that the CMOs gets really excited about it. They get a new tool, a new toy, and a new ability to impact the business.
Rebecca Willumson: That feels like a great place to wrap up. Thank you so much for the conversation. I really appreciate it.