Patrick Conway

The other area that as a nation I think we're going to have to tackle is pharmaceutical costs.

So obviously innovation in the drug space is incredibly important and has saved literally millions of lives.

But that innovation won't matter if people can't pay for it.

So over time, how do you solve this issue of both access and lowering the cost of health care?

The rural health issues are real where you have many very small practices and critical access in small hospitals.

So we're doing a couple of things.

One on those small practices, we are bringing resources to them.

So you cannot expect them to invest in EHR optimization, population health management.

These tools that we know can help achieve better health care quality and lower costs, so we're going to partner with somebody to bring those services to those rural primary care providers.

On the hospital side, you know, in Pennsylvania when I was in the Innovation Center, we put in place this population-based model for rural hospitals.

We're not there yet in North Carolina, but we are talking to rural hospitals about how we shift their payment model to be more population-based and not based on fee-for-service.

Focus on your customers and your people first.

My literal first day, I said, I don't know anything about this company, but I'm pretty sure if we focus on our customers and we focus on our people, our employees,

we'll be okay.

We have a more advanced strategy now.

But in reality, I think if you focus on the customer and you focus on your people, most everything else can fall into place.

I've now had the opportunity to lead in a number of different organizations, provider, government, now Blue Cross of North Carolina.

The pace of innovation and learning that we need, especially in today's fast-changing world, we have got to go quicker and learn faster.

So interestingly, some people don't do strategy and just execute.

And some people have strategy and never execute.