Q&A With Brent Davis, Top 50 VBC Thinker

Brent Davis Interview

Toward the end of our inaugural Drive for Better Care, we stopped in Orlando to meet with Brent Davis, CFO and COO of the Primary Health Division at AdventHealth, one of the largest integrated care systems in Florida, and one of Pearl’s Top 50 Value-Based Care Thinkers of 2024.

Read on for Steven Duque’s chat with Brent about leading a transition to value-based care, building out a strategy to take on the right amount of risk, and Advent’s whole-person care ethos that’s helping to drive their success in value-based care.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

 

Steven Duque: I’m Steven Duque, Chief Growth Officer of Pearl Health, and I’m thrilled to be here with Brent Davis, one of Pearl’s Top 50 Value-Based Care Thinkers for 2024.

Brent is Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer of the Primary Health Division at AdventHealth, a unified system with more than 90,000 caregivers across 51 hospital campuses and hundreds of care sites, including physician practices, hospitals, outpatient clinics, skilled nursing facilities, home health agencies, and hospice centers.

Brent is an experienced finance and operations executive with a long career in large hospital and healthcare systems, having recently served as Chief Financial Officer of Kettering Medical Center System and Chief Financial Officer of Avista Adventist Hospital. Before those experiences, he was a director of finance at Simi Valley Hospital, part of Adventist Health, and he’s now one of the most senior finance and operations leaders in healthcare.

Brent, I’m thrilled to be sitting here with you today. Thanks so much for hopping on the Pearlmobile on the Drive for Better Care.

Brent Davis: I love the purple van and it’s an honor to be with you today. Thank you.

Steven Duque: Brent, for our audience, we’d love to start by getting to know you better. You were an auditor before you moved into hospitals and healthcare. We’d love to hear about your journey to healthcare.

Brent Davis: You know, that bio reminded me of a lot of stops on the journey, but my journey in healthcare started long before I was born.

My family has been in healthcare for multiple generations, all the way back to providers walking down the streets and making house calls, trading for eggs and all those other things. So I grew up with stories not only of people on the provider side but the administration side, in insurance, practice administration, nutrition, a whole range of things. It’s been an area that has been celebrated as part of my family for many generations now.

That, of course, resulted in me not being interested in a healthcare career! That was the one thing that I was looking forward to innovating around — wasn’t there a big world outside of healthcare? After a few years with E&Y as an auditor, healthcare came knocking, and I have not looked back. It’s been a really fulfilling and exciting journey that continues to today.

Steven Duque: Thank you so much for sharing that with us, Brent. AdventHealth is one of the largest healthcare providers in the country with a vast integrated network of hospitals and clinics and a deep focus on whole-person care.

You’re transitioning your entire primary care network here in Florida to value-based care for traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage patients. What’s your vision for the future of value-based care here at Advent?

We want to be able to deliver that whole-person experience to every consumer, every time. We need a quality clinical product. After all, that's what we're here to deliver. And we need a solid financial growth model that ensures our viability and sustainability into the future.

Brent Davis: AdventHealth has a Vision 2030 pyramid. It’s a set of aspirations that we use when we look towards the future and say, “How does AdventHealth really position itself for success in the years to come?” That’s built on a foundation of whole-person care that we believe is our legacy. We cap that pyramid with whole-person care, meaning that that’s also our future. What fills in between are not only foundational elements, but also external-facing aspirations that need to come together to ensure that we’re viable and we’re iterating and innovating along with our communities into the future.

Some of those external frameworks include consumer access initiatives. We need to be easy to use and simple to access. We want to be able to deliver that whole-person experience to every consumer, every time. We need a quality clinical product. After all, that’s what we’re here to deliver. And we need a solid financial growth model that ensures our viability and sustainability into the future.

In AdventHealth’s vision though, there’s also a fourth element of that external facing aspiration section, and that’s managed population growth. What does that mean? It’s been a journey over the last few years for the company to really wrestle with and say that some of our markets are more mature along a value-based continuum than others.

Florida is where a lot of our economics and operations sit, and it’s still heavily fee-for-service. So what does it really look like to start to develop managed population risk capabilities in a legacy or strong fee-for-service market? That’s been one of our challenges.

A few years into this Vision 2030 journey, it was recognized that our legacy structure did not provide the same room for innovation and focus that the managed population risk really needed. And so the primary health division was born. I was a regional CFO for a group of our hospitals here in Florida, and I got a call that said, “Hey, how would you like to take a role really focusing on this initiative?” And that was a real surprise. To focus on something outside the four walls of the hospital was something that I hadn’t done since I started in healthcare, and for the last year or so has been a really exciting journey to unpack what we have and really position it for success in the future. Value became a very real element of that journey because we looked at the fee-for-service economics and what it took to subsidize primary care clinics, and we couldn’t get to a break-even or a financially viable model without value-based care.

We have a lot of Medicare beneficiaries in the state of Florida and we said, “Hey, we’re getting paid on the Medicare fee schedule, but if we were to be successful, that could potentially unlock additional revenue that really creates the opportunity to invest in services, sites, and other things that are really going to take care up to new levels.” 

That also is predicated on a financial model that actually supports continued investments in growth in those areas. So that was the eye opener for me that says, “Hey, core operations and focus discipline is not enough.” We actually need to unlock the programs and opportunities that government, payers, and other people have set up and actually chart a course to make sure that we’re going to be viable.

I’ll take a breath there to see if I’m headed in the right direction. But that was the turning point in my mind that said this is critical to our present and future aspirations.

Steven Duque: Thank you, Brent, that was excellent. It’s great to hear your thoughts on how you outlined your strategic plan and did the math to break down what the financial opportunity was in value-based care.

We’d love to hear about that particular facet of what you just shared. We know that a lot of folks in similar seats as you in financial executive leadership positions in hospitals in particular, find themselves in a tough position as they think through how the math clears in value-based care, especially alongside competing business models and legacy ways of doing things.

We’d love to hear about your journey and what you observed in the analysis that your team pulled together.

Brent Davis: When we looked at our primary care operations, we had about a hundred sites across central Florida with about 330 providers — that ran an eight-figure subsidy, a very large subsidy.

As we unpacked it, there were absolutely operational efficiencies that could be gained: productivity, operational synergies, span of control, centralized efficiency, supply contracts, overhead load, provider mix (meaning the number of physicians versus APPs). There’s just a number of operational metrics that said, “Hey, we could really impact that total subsidy number and set us on a totally new trajectory,” but it didn’t get us to zero.

It really required something else. So as we started to look at other models out there, we worked with a consulting group that connected us with 10 to 12 high-performing primary care groups around the country. And we really double-clicked on, “Hey, how are you viable? How are you sustainable? How are you doing what you’re doing? Because your results look entirely different from ours.”

As a business, we believed that there was another opportunity. There was something to actually unlock that would not only enhance our operational and financial reality, but also what type of care we’re able to provide to specific populations.

We still provided great clinical care. We were a value to the system. We were part of the AdventHealth ecosystem and continuum and so forth. But, as a business, we believed that there was another opportunity. There was something to actually unlock that would not only enhance our operational and financial reality, but also what type of care we’re able to provide to specific populations.

So we took a big step forward, in engaging an enablement company that allowed us to take a bigger step into a risk program, ACO REACH and other MA contracts, that frankly the system (and even I myself) was more leery to take a step into. Risk cuts both ways, and being a system with an existing subsidy, we were mindful to keep that from increasing.

I’ll also share that a few years ago, about three years ago, AdventHealth opened some senior care clinics: think Chen Med, Iora, or Oak Street lookalikes. In the last year or so, we took a much larger step because we had an enablement partner that was able to provide some wraparound services, some IT tools, and some actuarial expertise to give us a lot more comfort that we could successfully and sustainably take risk on a much larger portion of our patient panels.

When folks in our system start to get worried about how we’re managing Medicare and the care of our Medicare panels, my first reaction is to talk about where our margin sits as a company today. What payer mix really drives our margins? Are hospitals making a sustainable margin on Medicare today? And the answer is no. Our hospitals don’t get rich off of Medicare. Physicians don’t get rich off of Medicare. This is, in our American healthcare system, a big cost shift. There’s a cost share where commercial insurance subsidizes the care delivery model, not only for them, but for Medicare, Medicaid, and other payer classes.

And so I say, “Hey, if we were successful in keeping a Medicare beneficiary out of a hospital, out of an ED, for care needs that didn’t actually require those levels of care, are we financially impacted positively or negatively?” And my analysis shows that actually we’re going to be better off. We’re in a growing market, right? We can’t keep up with the demand. We can’t build hospitals fast enough, in many cases, to keep up with the utilization.

So we’re just saying, “Hey, if this care can be delivered at a different level, at a more appropriate level, it allows access for more people who actually need acute care.” And financially, this is a real advantageous population to iterate on and with. And that’s different from taking risk on commercial populations, IFP populations, or others.

Populations are actually very specific. Historically, we’ve globally thought about healthcare risk and value-based care as something we’re going to boil the ocean for. We’re going to somehow save the state or the country, or we get wrapped up in these big esoteric philosophical arguments.

And for a specific population, do we actually know them to the extent that we can develop the right care solutions, and engage them proactively in a way so that we have a chance to bend that total cost of care trend? If so, then we have a chance.

And if not, then we need to figure out another strategy. This is a specific, targeted strategy in developing the right things for the right populations, which I think is really key. Then the numbers start to get easier to digest, easier to analyze. It’s when you get up and up and up and then start to make these grand decisions and think, well, this is not on our roadmap. We can’t possibly do this, moving hundreds of millions of dollars around. You say, “Let’s just take a breath. What if we did this just for them? What about just for these patients with these providers in this market today? Do we have a chance?”

Steven Duque: I love the nuanced thought that you shared about optimizing the Medicare line of business to enable effective allocation of resources to support and provide access to patients and other lines of business that may have a higher impact of being served through the resources that you have.

But also using preventative care and whole patient care as a means to ensure that those patients do get the care they need, and they’re not over utilizing AdventHealth’s available resources, taking that opportunity and access from someone who may need that care more pressingly.

Whole-person care, value-based care really means taking clinical responsibility and financial responsibility for patients.

Brent Davis: One thing I love about value-based care is that it aligns so well with our whole-person care promise. I just gave a presentation yesterday to a group of our hospitals in West Florida, and we were talking about how whole-person care, value-based care really means taking clinical responsibility and financial responsibility for patients.

We’ve always taken clinical responsibility. That’s the sacred trust that a patient and caregiver extend to one another millions of times across our system every day. I mean, that’s just table stakes, but historically, we haven’t had to think about taking financial responsibility with a population, with a patient, with a member, with a beneficiary, with a consumer.

We said, “We’ll save your life, or we’ll provide the cath, or we’ll do the scope” — we’ll do what needs to be done. But at the end of the day, we’re going to go ahead and tally up what we did for you and then you can pay us for it. It’s a disconnected conversation, but value-based care really brings those together to say, “Let’s actually manage this together.”

Let’s look at what you need today, and you have options. We have options together. We’re actually building things together with you, and let’s chart a course. That model is not for everybody, both on the patient or consumer side and on the provider side. But for many, that’s an advantage — that’s an actual enhancement to what is largely a “just-in-time, we’re there when you need us” fee-for-service model.

Steven Duque: One of the things that’s come through in our conversation is that in addition to whole-person care, you also have a really unique focus on operational excellence, and that seems to permeate everything in terms of how you think about your clinical operations and your care model. It’s clearly evident too in the results that you’ve driven in value-based care.

What goes into the secret sauce of what you’ve done to date? How do you go about running things to enable greater performance and better patient outcomes in value-based care?

Brent Davis: I feel like we’re still pretty nascent in this space. You know, it’s not for lack of energy and vision and starting to iterate. It’s relative — I understand that value-based care is still new. This is still a new paradigm, largely, for the American healthcare system, but I look at some of these pacesetter organizations out there, and a lot of them aren’t legacy hospital systems.

A lot of these are pure plays, people who have really designed something specific, and it can work so well. When I look at that, and I contrast that to where we are, it really challenges me to think “How do we continue to iterate quickly? How do we engage and deploy and execute quickly, so that we can start to really demonstrate that core competency?” I could talk about coding and documentation, managing utilization, care management techniques, and a host of teams and IT tools. And there’s a lot of other possible things that you all know much better than me.

One of the areas that I’m really investing in in our company is tying these principles, tools, and services to our employee plan. AdventHealth is a self-funded insurer. We have over 120,000 beneficiaries on our plan — we are in a unique position to deliver whole-person care to our large and growing team member population. Because after all, we’re the plan, we’re the payer, we’re the provider network, and we’re the population.

We’re actually building this for ourselves. And that is such a unique paradigm. We don’t have an insurance company — we’re not a [public] payer today, but we do it for a large population. So bringing those elements together has really started a conversation that going into next year, we have some exciting changes ahead in plan design, in provider access, in clinical solutions, and we have some exciting consumer tools that incentivize and engage our population in an entirely new experience.

We’re sitting here in Orlando and when Disney cast members work for Disney, they have access to parks, right? There’s some perks that say, “hey, I work for Disney or I work for Universal, and I get to eat our own cooking,” so to speak.

AdventHealth team members get to eat our own cooking, but what if we could enhance that menu a little bit? What if we can bring some new solutions so that people start to look at it and say, “Hey, I’m actually experiencing a brand of healthcare, a care continuum, that actually knows me and is actually engaging me with the right services and making it easy.” So if I had a chance to do this, and my neighbors and other employers got to experience this too, it’s such a strategic advantage and it really calls people to question what they do from a totally different standpoint. So our urgent care centers, our virtual care solutions, our pop health org, our clinically integrated networks now have an actual beneficiary.

So I say, “Is that going to work? Hey, is that going to work for you and me? When I’m sick, when you’re sick, is this going to work for us?” Well, I’m not sure. “When we pick up the phone, when we engage the chat bot, when we look this up on the app, will it actually work?”

And that changes the paradigm, because in some areas, the answer is a resounding yes. With the investments that AdventHealth has made over the past many years, it says absolutely. Our life will be saved — we will receive top quality clinical care. We will utilize some great services, eat great food, see great doctors and everything else.

But in some areas, the answer is still no. That’s a real call to action that goes beyond a large, undefined population to a population that we all really care about: ourselves, our family members, our colleagues. And, all the way across, there are a lot of services and operational initiatives that go into helping an organization realize, “Hey, if I do change plan design, if I do change network, if I do change incentives, if I do change all these things — is it going to work?”

We’re starting to have the courage to make those changes based on this orientation and energy and focus that we’re able to bring across the company.

Steven Duque & Brent Davis with the PearlMobile

Steven Duque: That is awesome. And there’s nothing like eating your own food to drive refinement of the recipes.

Brent Davis: It’s just such a compelling opportunity, and I’m so proud of the organization for taking that on and leaning into it. It’d be easy to say, “Well, let’s go ahead and deliver that to someone else and we’ll just see how it does for them. We’re going to go ahead and keep what we like.” But no, we’re actually doing it and that’s, for me, that’s assuring and it’s really confirming. It’s really saying, “Hey, we’re actually going to try this and will continue to iterate into more and more value-based principles, and as we build them up, those will benefit our Medicare populations, our other direct to employer populations, and our IFP plan” — it’s going to raise all boats.

It’s compelling, when you talk about innovating in a healthcare system and in a hospital based system, how do you make it real? You can talk about numbers, Medicare economics, and other things, but let’s bring this home. Patient satisfaction actually includes us! And it’s been a really fun journey.

Steven Duque: That’s super exciting, and hats off to you and the team for having the courage to pressure test your own services to refine and improve them.

As you think about the bigger landscape of value-based care and these risk-based arrangements and reinventing these reimbursement models or payment models, what do you see as some of the biggest barriers to adoption, and how are you thinking about that as you drive and lead the way at AdventHealth and more broadly in the market?

Brent Davis: We were having a conversation just this morning about this. I’m very committed to a future of value-based care.

At a macro level, I don’t believe that the country will be able to keep up with the same growth rate of healthcare expenditures indefinitely. I think there’s a limit to that. I don’t know where that limit is. I don’t know how long it will take to get there. But at some point, I think we have to look ourselves in the mirror and say, “Hey, are these trends sustainable?”

And if not, what do we anticipate happening? That was one of the paradigms that AdventHealth had when they established managed population risk as an element of Vision 2030. They said we actually need to position ourselves today for a future that we know will be different, we’re just not sure how. We have to figure it out.

So iterating in the employee plan, iterating in Medicare populations and senior-based clinics across our portfolio of value-based care: those were all lines in the water. “Hey, is this going to work? Is this something we can build on for the future and so forth?”

But at a macro level, I think there are several things that indicate that the future will be different. If we start there, it’s really understanding how to help an organization make that transition at the pace that’s both sustainable for the organization — how can they actually be successful financially and clinically in the market from a consumer perspective with their team members, with their providers, with their payer partners, with the full stack of stakeholders — but also move at the pace of business, at the pace of the economics, at the pace of the market.

And that’s the rub, I think. We’re not starting from a clean slate — the plane is in the air. For the changes that we have to make, we’re saying, “OK, are we going to flip this next population to a value-based contract?”

We really have to understand the current state. Where is the value to each stakeholder today? In a contract, you have a fee-for-service rate, you have a certain market share, you have maybe some services that you charge for, that you get reimbursed for. There might be some other incentives, like pay for performance (P4P) incentives.

Then you could look at a fee-for-service contract and say there’s no value-based care element, there’s no risk element today. But what does a value-based care construct look like? You may want to shift some of that fee-for-service revenue or some of that P4P revenue into more of a shared savings, upside/downside model.

Well, how much? How fast? What are the right incentives? What do we think the outcome is going to be? Would we actually change a fee-for-service rate if we felt like market share was going to go up or down? Do we have the capacity and access to do it? Do we have the clinical solution to actually follow through on that?

We’re really building out a framework that says, “What do we have today?” And then if we were to change to move value from [lower to higher], there’s then this cone of expectation. There’s a distribution curve, a standard deviation out here that says, “Hey, I could lose a lot more, or I could pick up a lot more.” And, then you develop that and you say, “OK, is the organization ready for this amount of risk? Are we able to perform? What chance do we have to give ourselves an asymmetric advantage here?”

That framework, I think, is different for every company. In every market, in every company, every practice and every provider, they need to figure out, “Hey, is the upside worth the downside exposure? How can I mitigate that? Am I at a point where I’m required to make that step? If not required, am I incentivized to make that step? If not incentivized, do I believe I’m going to be better off at an undetermined point in the future, having taken those steps today?”

We’re trying to distill the multiple elements down to a few levers and really chart what we have today. We have a certain group of value-based care programs, lives, and economics today. What if this changes? What if a competitor to the market comes in and does this? What if CMS does that? What if MA plans start to pull back, or continue to pull back, given some recent headwinds in that space. What if, what if, what if, what if, right?

We’re charting courses and saying, “Hey, I think our upside is here. Our downside is here. Our expectation is somewhere in the middle. Are we ready to continue the path of that journey into risk? Or do we need to start to de-risk some of our relationships depending on the financial strength of the organization and the strategic opportunities that we have?” Running businesses is just a matter of tradeoffs and prioritizations.

Helping our company think through where value-based care sits in relation to a lot of other opportunities we have and challenges that we’re facing is a really fun ongoing challenge for us.

We’re charting courses and saying, “Hey, I think our upside is here. Our downside is here. Our expectation is somewhere in the middle. Are we ready to continue the path of that journey into risk? Or do we need to start to de-risk some of our relationships depending on the financial strength of the organization and the strategic opportunities that we have?

Steven Duque: Thank you so much for sharing that. I just love hearing your thoughts on how you’re dimensioning solving the problem, and to me, it sounds very much like strategic portfolio management.

Brent Davis: That’s it!

Steven Duque: You’re breaking down the work, you’re carving out different scenarios, you’re assessing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. And then you’re figuring out how to titrate your contract base across the set of contracts that you have as you engage the market and it sounds just like a really excellent structured way to approach it.

Brent Davis: You said it way better than I did. I love it.

Steven Duque: As you’re seeking to navigate all of these complexities and as you manage what must be an incredibly complicated portfolio and array of scenarios, the stakeholder management and the leadership through consensus and/or navigation of different people, entities, and competing interests is incredibly complex.

I’d love to hear your advice to leaders who, like you, may be navigating these incredibly complicated headwinds, and may be trying to benefit from some tailwinds as they navigate this type of transformation.

Brent Davis: Trading on credibility alone, you’ll only be as good as your last result. I think we owe it to the future of value-based care to set up frameworks that allow the organization to understand that when things are going really well or things aren’t going as well, you’re part of a longer journey and a transformation that ultimately will position the company for resilience into the future.

I liken it to our investment portfolio. Companies go through market fluctuations all the time and you can be percentage points up and you can be percentage points down. But you can’t always run for the exits when you’re down, and you can’t always double down when you’re at the high, you need a strategy, right? You need to have the wherewithal and the commitment to a strategy to see it through.

So I liken value-based care a lot to that. We will continue to ride some real tailwinds and be faced with continual headwinds. Ultimately being confident in that future aspirational destination and then continuing to quickly innovate and iterate towards that is the work for all of us.

Steven Duque: I really appreciate that thought. One thing that struck me from what you just said is that it sounds like there are multiple horizons that you’re chasing at once. And I imagine that in your seat you have to think on an annual basis, maybe a quarterly basis, while at the same time making certain that you’re investing over a longer horizon.

I’m curious to hear how you think about that in your seat and how you navigate making some of those longer term bets while also making certain you honor your commitments to the shareholders.

Brent Davis: Fee-for-service and value-based care aren’t mutually exclusive. Expanding primary care access works in both reimbursement paradigms.

You want more primary care access in both worlds. You want accurate coding and documentation in both worlds. You want to manage patients through efficient care sites through both models. There’s a lot of crossover that doesn’t mutually exclude each other.

Now, how much surgery happens in an inpatient OR versus an outpatient surgery center — that starts to get a little sketchy. If you start diverting unnecessary ED utilization, that starts to move some margin dollars around. There are some real transformation challenges out there.

From where we started a year ago in the primary health division, we look at the growth in our markets and our primary care model and we know that it takes new patients too long to see one of our providers — there’s not enough primary health care today to keep up with continued growing demand. So what’s nice about that is that I’m not forced to make decisions that really are potentially offsetting or potentially diluting one strategy for the other.

I actually have a mandate to grow primary care and I think it can be successful in really any future scenario. So I’m really grateful to work for and with an organization that prioritizes primary care, because I’m clear that that’s not every health system’s or other system’s objective. But I think given our shared pursuit of whole-person care and value-based care, primary care is going to be an essential element, and we’re focusing on making sure it’s efficient and high quality, high value, high satisfaction. For me, it’s been relatively easy, but I certainly respect those that are in a much more tenuous position.

Steven Duque: Absolutely. We at Pearl Health certainly share your views on the importance of primary care and have a deep appreciation and respect for what you do at AdventHealth. I’d love to just hear your thoughts on the ethos that underpins what you just shared about AdventHealth’s approach or thinking on primary care.

Brent Davis: It goes probably all the way back to our inception in the 1800s — the Seventh Day Adventist Church really prioritized personal health. You go back to Kellogg, of Kellogg’s Cereal, who was the founder of our first hospital. He was a physician, and he saw people’s diet of the day and said, “Hey, how can I develop a breakfast that’s high fiber and low fat and something that’s actually going to enhance a person’s health outcome?” And so cereal was born. There’s all sorts of stories about how cornflakes and other cereals came to be.

That sprung into a series of health care innovations that say, “Hey, what, what power does environment have?” Sunlight, fresh air, fresh drinking water, resting enough, having social connection, and a number of things that weren’t all about blood transfusions or the standard practice of the day, but taking a more holistic view and saying, “Can we actually promote wellness and can that potentially keep people healthy?”

When I think about the specialties, primary care is maybe one of the closer specialties to that. There’s a lot of sick care specialties, right? And primary care is one of those too, but your primary care provider is who you go to on an annual basis. (Hopefully for all you out there, go get your annual checkup!)

We should go and say, “Hey, how am I doing?” Let’s check my labs. Let’s check my levels. Let’s look at my reflexes. Let’s look down my throat. Look at my ear. It’s an actual proactive step. It’s a relationship that’s built on saying, “Hey, you’re well today. Let’s keep you well. How can we help you achieve your personal goals over the next year, over the next five years?” We have financial advisors that do that for our financial portfolios. Do you have that for your personal health?

We can say, “Hey, do you want to be around for your grandkids? Do you want to run a marathon? Do you want to carry books and big loads up the stairs in your house? What does success look like for you? What is your goal and how can we help you achieve that? What kind of exercise, what kind of nutrition, what kind of rest is needed?”

Helping people connect with that, I think, is a legacy mindset that undergirds this whole-person care concept for AdventHealth that really says, “How do we embody that today?” We no longer have orchestras on the lawns of our hospitals or dancing classes and other things that were offered back in the sanitarium days, hundreds of years ago. But what continues today? What can we continue to afford to do? What can we invest in?

What kind of care pathways and what kind of models actually will promote health and wellness into the future? We think that primary care is core and is critical to that. If you don’t have that, the other specialties don’t show up to help you navigate the care continuum.

Your cardiologist can take you from here to there, but where’s your quarterback? Where’s your partner? Where’s your advisor? Just to help you navigate — and AdventHealth needs to help people to have navigators. We’re a big system, we’re broad and complex — and we need to make it easy to use. That’s really accelerated by having a primary care provider.

What kind of care pathways and what kind of models actually will promote health and wellness into the future? We think that primary care is core and is critical to that. If you don't have that, the other specialties don't show up to help you navigate the care continuum.

Steven Duque: Amazing. Brent, we’re just so grateful that you spent this time with us today, joining us here on the Pearlmobile, on the Drive for Better Care.

I’m sure that our listeners will agree that you certainly warrant the title of a Top VBC Thinker of 2024, and we’re honored to sit here with you. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, sharing your personal journey, and sharing your approach to strategic portfolio management as you seek to climb the hills of healthcare.

Brent Davis: I’ve enjoyed it very much. Thanks for the opportunity.

Q&A With Brent Davis, Top 50 VBC Thinker

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Top 50 VBC Thinkers 2024

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