Industry PERSPECTIVES
In the last installment,
This weeks Industry Perspectives featuring:
Aetna
SEVP and market executive
Broker of Record,
Chief Executive Officer
Grandview Asset Management
Co-Founder & CEO
Listrak
President & Chief Executive Officer
R.
SEVP and market executive
As we begin a new year, we're grateful for our organization's success in 2015. It was the best year in
But what does choosing on your own terms mean? For us, it's about alleviating the stress of choosing by providing customers with a simple and personal banking experience tailored to their needs. As we move into 2016, we're committed to doing just that: providing top-notch expertise through our talented bankers, innovative solutions that enhance your banking experience, and a continued dedication to serving the community. It's what sets us apart.
When you choose your bank, the team is a critical part of the equation. At
While the importance of technology continues to rise, we still believe in personal interactions with our bankers at local branches. By choosing
Perhaps most importantly,
You can expect the same
When you choose your bank, choose
President & Chief Executive Officer
PinnacleHealth
My meetings at PinnacleHealth System usually start with the question: "How do we keep patients healthy and out of the hospital?" It may seem an odd question for a health system's president and CEO, but our focus continues to be on providing the right care at the right time in the right setting. That focus reduces hospital admissions. Our goal is first and foremost to keep people healthy. However, if they become sick, we are here to promote healing and work diligently to get them home sooner.
Illness is expensive. A greater share of the cost of care is falling on individuals through coinsurance and deductibles. The sicker you are, the more your care costs. When our patients avoid a serious progression of illness or complications from a disease, it improves their well-being and it saves money for everyone, including business owners in central
Just think about the difference between what's involved in a 30-minute office visit versus three days in the hospital. That's why we promote having regular visits with a primary care doctor. Health problems can be identified early and fixed before they become serious and expensive.
To that end, every primary care practice in our broad
The care team can include doctors, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, pharmacists, social workers, medical assistants and other staff members in the office. Everyone works together to make the patient's care as convenient, accessible and effective as possible while understanding and respecting the patient's wishes.
The medical home model is just one part of our on-going commitment to provide a patient-centered, integrated health system focused on quality, access and coordination of care. Our integrated care model-including a new electronic health record system and a soon-to-be-released, improved patient information portal called My PinnacleHealth-comprises coordinating components that reduce the number of repeat diagnostic tests and improves communication between providers and their patients.
By applying this high level of coordination and technology, you and your physicians have access to your test results and medical records anytime, from anywhere. The result: improved safety and reduction of errors, both of which reduce costs.
Furthermore, through coordination of care and services, patients can easily transition between inpatient and outpatient settings. No matter where the patient is being seen, all physicians will have access to the patient's information, which ensures continuity and appropriate follow-up care.
In implementing best practices for transitioning care, important communication occurs during an inpatient stay and again during the transition to home. We use these opportunities to ensure that the patient has all services and support needed, patients and families understand the care plan and the importance of follow-up care, and we have addressed any other practical concerns that the patient may have.
After a hospital stay, timely follow-up care with his or her primary care practice can help ensure that a patient understands the next steps based on the diagnosis, how they are progressing in their recovery, and what additional tests or physician visits, if any, are needed.
For outpatient services, follow-up care is equally important. For a patient who has visited the ER for a fracture, for instance, follow-up with his or her primary care physician helps the patient track their healing and arrange for additional services like orthopedic care or physical therapy, if necessary, and the primary care team can monitor progress in the treatment plan.
As part of our mission to provide the highest levels of patient-focused care, we are committed to being responsible for our patient's entire course of care-before, during and after they leave a PinnacleHealth facility. As a healthcare leader in central
R.
There is a great quote by American songwriter
This statement could not be truer whether constructing a building or building a company. I was fortunate to join the
As with any new leadership position, much of my time has been spent observing and absorbing the culture and foundation of the organization. What I quickly learned is
As an organization we are about to begin our annual strategic planning process and a significant consideration is to evaluate our current markets for expansion or contraction. During this process, new market areas may present opportunities for growth and we as an organization must be agile enough to move if and when the opportunity presents itself. We know in today's ever changing world, differentiation is a dynamic process that requires constant attention and focus. Staying on the cutting edge of technology with software such as BIM (
As I consider the current market and related economy, the only thing that remains certain is uncertainty. While the economy and most markets have definitely rebounded and continue to grow, more than ever there is a cloud of uncertainty around the depth of growth in any given market segment. The magnitude of that growth tends to be a bit sporadic, making the process of market evaluation challenging at the least.
However, with the stabilization of some markets, there does appear to be a fundamental shift in the buying patterns of developers and project owners. Specifically, the length and depth of the shrinking economy drove the construction industry into a commodity based business model. This movement almost overnight diminished the value placed on the actual business relationship as well as unique differentiators which translate to value for the customer.
Under the commodity model, the primary determining factor to being awarded a contract was to be the lowest bidder. With a shift back toward "value-based" contracting, we are continuing to develop new and enhanced value added propositions that provide real and tangible benefits to our clients. Communication in "real time" and transparency throughout the entire project life are two ways to solidify these relationships.
Mowery has a long history in construction and a number of market segments, including senior care, higher education, medical, warehousing and distribution and auto dealerships. We have the experience and management systems to perform on projects regardless of size, scope and complexity - whether a
ABOUT R. S. MOWERY & SONS
An unwavering dedication to excellence has allowed
R.
Having won innumerable craftsmanship awards and project recognition, we are proud that the
Aetna
It's an exciting time to be working in the health insurance industry. This has never been a business that stood still for very long, but the changes we're seeing as we find health benefits solutions for individuals and businesses, and as we forge new relationships with hospitals and physicians, are among the most dramatic I've seen.
More than ever, the focus has shifted from the group to the consumer. At Aetna, we're committed to building a healthier world, and that begins with helping individuals enjoy as many healthy days as they can. Since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and the health care exchange, more and more people are shopping for health insurance as individual consumers.
Less than half of the insured people in this country receive coverage as part of an employer group, with the rest covered by individual
Aetna purchased HealthAmerica (Coventry) in 2013, and continues to service HealthAmcrica clients as we complete the transition to Aetna.
We're listening more than ever to individual consumers and designing plans to meet their specific needs. Chief among these is affordability and high quality. Our most popular individual plans are those with the lowest premiums, and while consumers still want access to hospitals and physicians, they're understandably most interested in cost.
That's why we're focused on plans tied to value-based contracts. In
These plans, available on and off the exchange, use PinnacleHealth's and Valley Preferred's integrated systems of physicians and hospitals to create a more coordinated patient experience. Members see improved health care outcomes, receive enhanced benefits and save money when they use providers affiliated with one of the two health systems.
Aetna already offers plans linked to the two accountable care arrangements to employer groups in the area. They feature a new payment model that rewards physicians for meeting certain measures designed to lower costs by decreasing waste, improve quality and deliver more patient satisfaction.
Aetna is working with hospital systems in ways that were unthinkable just a few years ago. Historically, insurers and hospitals often found themselves entrenched in adversarial roles. In recent years, however, we've found new ways to work together for the good of the people we serve.
Payment models are evolving from a traditional system that rewarded providers for doing more - more treatments, more tests, more procedures - into one that rewards them for doing better by their patients. Individual consumers who buy our health plans and receive care from these health systems, will be the ultimate winners. I'm looking forward to helping people have as many healthy days as possible in 2016.
Chief Executive Officer
Grandview Asset Management
www.grandviewassetmanagement.com
2016 will be an exciting year at Grandview Asset Management as we embark on an initiative that has been a long time in planning. This year we kick off our new NVomen and Investments program, focused on educating and building women's confidence in personal financial management and planning. This program will be focused on matters distinctly important to women at any juncture in life. Some woman find themselves by middle age starting over in one manner or another. This new beginning, often daunting and unexpected, comes with many questions and decisions. We will discuss how divorce or the death of a spouse changes the complexity of managing not only day to day life but long term finances as well. Other women have chosen to remain single, which presents its own concerns and decision making strategies. We feel it is critical that women understand all of their options before making these decisions. Our goal is to provide women with a forum to discuss their unique concerns while providing advice and support and instilling confidence. We will launch our weekly live "Women and Investments" radio show on Saturday afternoons from
Co-Founder & CEO
Listrak
Since launching in a small office in
What makes Listrak unique is that we are solely focused on the retail industry. In addition, while all of our competitors who were once independently-owned have been purchased by large corporations like Salesforce,
So what exactly do we do?
Listrak offers a digital marketing platform that allows retailers to collect data on individual customers' and prospective customers' shopping and purchase behaviors from a variety of touchpoints and use it to create and send personalized marketing campaigns that drive incremental revenue. In short, we help retailers optimize digital marketing campaigns by engaging customers with timely, relevant, personalized messages across channels.
As we enter 2016, Listrak's vision is to continue to blur the line between the in-store and online experience that shoppers have come to expect, but that is often challenging for retailers to achieve. Our goal is to help retailers gain a better understanding of their customers and to continue to develop tools and strategies they can use to build and maintain long-term relationships with their brands.
Simply put, we want to enable retailers to deliver the right message at the right time to the right customer in the right place and with the right effect.
The right message means the words and images retailers can deliver to shoppers through highly personalized content and product recommendations based on individual shopping habits and purchase histories.
The right time means using Listraks' event-triggered and open-time optimization capabilities. With Listrak, retailers can send relevant communications to shoppers when they purchase, don't purchase again within a set period of time, put an item in an online shopping cart but leave without purchasing it, browse a product on a website but do not put it in a shopping cart, and more. In addition, with Listrak retailers' emails feature up-to-the-moment personalized content based on when each recipient opens the email, rather than at the moment the email was sent.
Reaching the right person is all about targeting. Listrak clients can segment subscribers based on everything from gender and location to categories and brands purchased, time since last purchase, frequency of purchases, purchase totals, and more.
Although Listrak began as an Email Service Provider, today we must enable retailers to reach customers in every channel - from email to mobile to social, on retailers' websites, on other websites through digital ads and in-store. And, because retailers need measurable results, Listrak also provides reporting, attribution modeling, customer insights and predictive analytics to demonstrate the impact of their digital marketing efforts.
Broker of Record,
"The biggest challenge facing the
Interest rates are slightly rising and forecasted to continue upward. Our uncertainty is when they will rise, how much they will rise and what happens when they do. On the surface, cap rates, the historical metric for commercial real estate investment, are expected to rise (lowering values) as the cost of debt increases in sync with an interest rate rise. We, however, believe that cap rates will basically hold as interest rates begin to climb. Our banks and capital sources have money to lend...and rising interest rates raise incentives to lend. Accordingly, expect to see more money chasing a limited supply of properties as debt coverage ratios, higher loan to values (LTVs) and slower amortizations are offered. At a minimum, property values will hold, if not increase with the limited supply of available commercial real estate.
Activity in the
The fundamentals of the regional commercial real estate market remain strong. We see the clearing of distressed former commercial mortgage backed securities (CMBS) backed properties underway at value- add based pricing. At the same time we are seeing record sale prices of leased, performing assets. While interest rates will absolutely rise,
Anticipating continued market strength in the next few years, we believe the time is particularly ripe for sellers to bring product to market and investors to take advantage of continued strong regional fundamentals. According to
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