Michael Boblitz began his role as CEO of Athens (Ga.) Orthopedic Clinic thinking about how he could leverage partnerships to grow the practice’s mission to provide industry-leading orthopedic care.
“I’m always a big believer that two heads are better than one, and strategic partnerships I’ve always referred to as like a retirement account,” he said. “You have a diversified retirement account, and in some years certain funds outperform, and then in other years, certain funds underperform. And occasionally there’s a fund that underperforms for many years, and you just have to replace that with a new partnership. Going back to my days at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, I learned the significance of partnerships and how that can really accelerate your purpose and your vision and your growth agenda.”
That mindset is what Mr. Boblitz brought into early conversations with Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia, which the group has partnered with this year.
“When I started about a year ago, I reached out to the president of Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia and talked about what we were trying to do here and how it’s just getting started,” he said. “We had dinner around my third week on the job and started to think about how to support one another and both leverage each other’s synergies.”
The partnership boiled down to one shared goal: dropping costs for the patients and insurance.
Taking a face-to-face approach is a strategy Mr. Boblitz has leveraged back when he was CEO of Tallahassee (Fla.) Orthopedic Clinic. During that role he also spoke with the top leader at Capital Health Plan and asked, “What can we do better?” Those conversations led to a collaboration where Capital Health Plan invested in a new MRI at TOC to support patient access and keep them within the practice’s service network.
With AOC, Mr. Boblitz said he’s especially excited about the opportunities to strengthen outpatient care, especially with high site-of-service costs differences.
In October, AOC opened Georgia’s first private ASC exclusively for orthopedic and spine surgery.
“We’re big believers that specialization matters,” Mr. Boblitz said. “With site of service differentials, the lion’s share of those patients historically have been cared for in hospitals. In fact when I joined AOC, over 70% of those joint replacement patients and some spine surgery patients were in the hospital settings. But many of those patients didn’t have high-risk BMIs, significant heart disease or other comorbidities. So we knew we could do better, but in order to do that we needed to create and make an investment in a multimillion-dollar ASC designed to replicate the traditional hospital facility in a more private and a lower-cost environment. A big part of our partnership with Anthem was to create solutions for the community and to allow patients to get better access in a lower cost environment with great quality.”
There’s also an opportunity to serve more patients beyond the state, Mr. Boblitz said.
“What I love about Anthem is they cover the state of Georgia and beyond,” Mr. Boblitz said. “We’re talking about areas where they have access challenges and cost of care challenges where we could, for example, go well beyond our network and partner in very distant communities where there’s needs. Anthem has that data that I don’t have, and there could be a lot of really amazing partnerships about a much broader network in the future.”
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