In our debut podcast, Dr. Alessi starts at the top, with “Dr. Andy” — Dr. Andrew Agwunobi, UConn Health CEO and executive VP for health affairs. Dr. Andy shares his thoughts on the state of health care delivery, what he learned from his experience in the private sector, and the big things on the verge of happening with the upcoming partnership between UConn Health and Waterbury HEALTH. Submit questions for Healthy Rounds With Dr. Anthony Alessi: HealthyRounds@uchc.edu Dr. Andrew Agwunobi: https://www.uconnhealth.org/about-us/leadership UConn Health: https://www.uconnhealth.org Support from UConn Health Orthopedics and Sports Medicine: https://www.uconnhealth.org/orthopedics-sports-medicine Grant support from Coverys: www.coverys.com Watch this interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/bdH6geAXAAY Transcript Dr. Alessi: Welcome to the Healthy Rounds Podcast, where we provide you with up-to-date, timely medical information from national and international leaders in their fields. This podcast is brought to you by UConn Health, with support from the Department of Orthopedic Surgery and a grant from Coverys. It is not designed to direct your personal health care, and that should only be done by your physician. I’m your host, Dr. Anthony Alessi, and it gives me great pleasure to welcome my guest today, Dr. Andy Agwunobi. Dr. Agwunobi is the CEO of UConn Health, as many of us know. He’s also the executive VP for Health Affairs here at the University of Connecticut. Andy, welcome to the show. Dr. Andy: Thank you, Tony. Great to be here. Dr. Alessi: Well, first of all, let me thank you for this opportunity. I mean, this opportunity would not happen without you and other people and the opportunity to produce a podcast and bring together a community of people from our community who want better health care, and we appreciate that. And especially this is our first episode Dr. Andy: Right. Dr. Alessi: So it’s great to have you as our first guest. Dr. Andy: Well, it’s a pleasure. Dr. Alessi: But let’s get started. As far as your career goes, what made you want to make kind of the switch from clinical medicine to really, to health care administration? Dr. Andy: Well, I think the short version is it probably started with my father, who was a general surgeon, British trained, but he also was a businessman at varying levels of success. I mean, he had at one time he had a pharmaceutical import export business, and at one time he was doing selling I think he had clothes that he was doing import, export, so a trucking business. So I grew up believing that you could do both, you could do sort of business and health care together and that was a normal thing. But I think maybe even more important to me was I just, I just like people and I like solving problems. And I always felt like if I could bring my, sort of, my, my, my love of interacting with teams, but use that to help solve problems in health care that would be perfect for me. Dr. Alessi: You know, several years ago you left us, and I like to think you went behind enemy lines, okay. you went and found out the secrets that they’d been hiding from us over in managed care. how had that experience helped you and what was that like? Dr. Andy: It was great. Just, for people, that are listening, I started as the CEO in UConn Health in 2015. And in 2022 I decided to join Humana which is a national managed care organization, to run their home solutions service, which basically is everything that happens outside of hospitals, so home health care, nursing homes, et cetera. And I did it for a couple of reasons. One is, I wanted to really understand that, that business, because I feel like a lot of care is going to go into the homes where meet people where they need the care. But I also wanted to see what it was like to run a national health care organization. And so I learned a lot, I enjoyed it, but it did teach me that we don’t put enough resources into making sure that the services that, I’m talking about in general, hospital industry, Dr. Alessi: Sure. Dr. Andy: but the services that we provide to patients are paid for fairly. Dr. Alessi: Very interesting, and, and since you bring up the national picture, I’d like to know, I mean, let’s face it, in the United States, we’re great at innovation, we’re great at research. But we’ve kind of failed when it comes to delivery of health care, and you’re a national leader, you understand the national perspective. How do we fix this? Dr. Andy: Well, I think you’re right. I mean, one thing I do want to underscore is how great we are in innovation. If you think about the NIH, NIH is the world’s largest funder of biomedical innovation, something like 37 billion a year. And then you think about venture capital, you think about private equity, you think about startups, entrepreneurial culture, we are sort of a center for innovation and, and entrepreneurial. And not just within our country. People come from ...
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Feb 2 202615 Min.