"We created our own beast": how point solutions fragmented the patient experience | Ellen Kelsay

Ellen Kelsay represents 460+ employers and more than  60 million people globally at the Business Group on Health. She's watching the same cost crisis play out across her entire member base in real time, which makes her read on what's working and what isn't worth paying close attention to.The uncomfortable through-line of this conversation: the industry built a massive ecosystem of point solutions with good intentions, but stitch a dozen together and the patient experience fragments, costs keep rising, and ROI becomes impossible to attribute. Ellen sees AI heading down the same road. Efficiencies are being claimed but not passed through, and she puts a number on it: roughly 1.5% of current healthcare trend may already be attributable to the negative effects of AI, including up-coding and inflationary revenue cycle applications. Trend is already running 6.5–9.5% depending on the firm. The math isn't hard.The more actionable half of the episode covers what leading employers are actually doing differently, including vendor summits that put every partner in the same room, aligned on shared outcomes and collective ROI for the same patient populations.Topics discussedWhy the status quo is already the most disruptive option employers have right nowDirectly asking the workforce what's blocking care access and what that two-way conversation actually surfacesVendor accountability: what employers are demanding from health plans and benefits partners that isn't being deliveredHow vendor summits work as an operating model for shared outcomes and collective ROI attributionThe 1.5% AI tax: how up-coding and unreturned efficiency gains are contributing to trendAI bot wars between health plans and providers and who is absorbing the costWhy AI is deploying too fast for the change management that made EHR adoption workImposter syndrome as a permanent fixture in senior leadership and how to reframe it without dismissing it