Clinician Letter: Why We Work At Clover Health
Co-Authors: Sophia Chang, MD, MPH, Chief Clinical Informatics Officer, Primary Care Internal Medicine; Mark Spektor, DO, MBA, Chief Medical Officer, Emergency Medicine; Kumar Dharmarajan, MD, MBA, Chief Scientific Officer, Geriatric and Cardiovascular Medicine
We’re often asked by our fellow physicians why we chose to work at Clover Health. Our answers revolve around the same essential point: We believe this company will revolutionize how physicians provide care to patients, making it better, cheaper, and more personalized for the people we promised to serve.
What we’re doing at Clover Health is the most important work of our careers. We have a combined 71 years of clinical experience, from the emergency room to the exam room to the classroom to the boardroom and beyond. We’ve worked for providers, like hospitals and outpatient facilities; payors, like insurance companies and Medicare; health systems, like the VA and academic medical centers; and more. Along the way, we’ve seen the many barriers that impede front-line clinicians from providing better care to their patients, especially the most vulnerable.
Over the years, we’ve seen and heard plenty of best-laid plans to help physicians provide better care for their patients, typically without success. By contrast, we believe Clover Health has an actionable and scalable strategy to make better healthcare a reality for everyone — and it’s already having a significant impact.
There are three main things that make Clover Health highly effective.
First, it listens to physicians.
Second, it leverages technology to break the barriers physicians face.
Third, it learns constantly, leading to ongoing improvements in physician performance and patient care.
The combination of these factors creates something wholly new in healthcare, so it’s worth exploring each one in detail.
We can’t overstate how important it is that Clover listens to the members of our profession. Many other companies don’t do that, which causes them to overlook some of healthcare’s biggest issues.
From the outset, Clover heard that physicians are increasingly blocked from doing the job they love: Helping their patients. Many now spend far more time than before doing the drudgery of desk work, including record keeping and billing. For many physicians, these tasks often follow them home.
This backwards system leaves physicians with less time to care for patients and less time to keep up with the latest clinical research and medical guidelines.
Clover Health set out to solve this major problem. The company recognizes that giving better care to patients starts by giving better support to physicians. Where many others have introduced more complexity, Clover promotes simplicity. Instead of forcing physicians to be something they’re not, Clover meets physicians where they are — and helps them get to where they want to be.
What makes this possible is the Clover Assistant. A software program with an underlying technology platform, its purpose is to enable physicians and advanced practitioners to provide the right care, in the right place, at the right time, to the right person.
Many physicians are skeptical of technology, for good reason. They’re regularly forced to use expensive and awkward products that weren’t developed with the doctor in mind — electronic health record systems are a case in point. By contrast, the Clover Assistant is optional and free for physicians who treat our members — and we pay them enhanced fees for using it. Best of all, it was designed by physicians for physicians. Those who use it love it, and as long-time physicians ourselves, we wish we had this technology earlier in our careers.
The Clover Assistant creates a real-time conversation between our technology platform and clinicians at the point of care. As they interact, the software helps them drill down to a patient’s specific conditions, treatments, and needs. The process surfaces key information and uncovers care gaps, painting a holistic picture of each patient in real time. Then it curates personalized, evidence-based recommendations — all of which are responsive to physician feedback.
All told, what starts with individual data points immediately leads to actionable information provided to the physician at the point of care. From our perspective as physicians, the Clover Assistant’s capabilities and ease of use are unmatched.
Critically, the Clover Assistant leaves decision-making power in physicians’ hands. Far from imposing, it empowers them to make informed choices that improve patient care and outcomes. As we know from experience, that’s exactly what every physician wants to achieve.
The benefits of Clover’s technology platform are significant and far-reaching. To start, it saves time and money. It reduces the overall time that physicians have to spend wrestling with a complex and costly record-keeping or billing system. It can relieve physicians of the need to step out of the examination room to consult or search through hundreds of pages of medical guidelines and formularies for the best course of action. Every second saved is time the physician can spend serving the person in front of them, whether face-to-face or virtually.
That’s what matters most: The Clover Assistant enables physicians to provide better care to patients. It helps them recommend the best medications and treatment based on individualized needs, factoring in cost, dose intensity, and prescription length. It helps them refer patients to effective and affordable clinical support services. At follow-up appointments, it helps them recommend a new care plan that builds on the previous one. At every stage, it facilitates a qualitative improvement in patient care.
Consider a few examples. For seniors, the Clover Assistant urges physicians to ask if patients have fallen in their homes. Physicians typically under-assess this issue, even though approximately one in four seniors experiences this struggle each year. When a physician discovers that a patient has fallen at home, the Clover Assistant suggests further consultations, useful medical equipment like canes and walkers, and other options that could prevent serious health problems including fall-related injuries. Similarly, for patients with diabetes, the Clover Assistant helps physicians instantly find out which statins are best suited to the patient, including optimal dosages, prescription durations, and relative costs.
By itself, this personalized approach represents a significant leap forward in the delivery and quality of care. But there’s one more critical and transformational factor at work. Because of its unique feedback loop, the Clover Assistant continuously improves our clinical recommendation engine and understanding of individual member needs, driving even better care.
Beneath the Clover Assistant’s user interface is an advanced machine learning system. As physicians log more interactions with their patients, the platform develops more tailored care recommendations. It gets better the more it gets used. On the back end, our clinical team is constantly building new evidence-based rules and adding the latest medical guidelines to the platform, which makes the recommendations better still. The result is a system that’s continually getting more precise, more powerful, more personalized.
And then there’s the speed. In our broad experience across healthcare, tech updates can take a year or more to roll out. The Clover Assistant, with its instant access to patient information from multiple data streams, is updated on a far more regular basis. To date, we’ve shipped 30+ versions in 2 years, each one better and more powerful than the last.
Yet to us, what’s most remarkable is the Clover Assistant’s potential. Right now, it serves primary care physicians treating Medicare Advantage patients in the markets where Clover currently offers plans. While we’re expanding into new markets in Medicare Advantage, the underlying platform also has the potential to assist a much broader range of clinicians, serving a much bigger share of the population, while improving care for a much larger number of conditions and health needs. We believe Clover’s technology is that powerful and that scalable.
We firmly believe that Clover has tremendous growth potential. The company’s approach is working in urban centers with the most advanced facilities, and we are rolling it out to rural settings with physician shortages. It’s working for traditionally underserved patients, as we serve a far greater percentage of low-income and minority patients than do our competitors. It’s working for telehealth, in-home care, and traditional office visits. As the company expands, we’re confident it will work in virtually every community, in virtually every corner of the country, and in virtually every kind of care situation.
That’s why we work at Clover Health. We’re excited to help our fellow physicians deliver better, personalized, evidence-based care to patients. We’re proud to work at a company that’s working to achieve transformative change at scale. And we’re pleased to say that Clover Health is only getting started.
Read the letter from our founders here: https://medium.com/clover-off-the-charts/founders-letter-who-we-are-and-why-we-exist-6d732266113e
IMPORTANT LEGAL INFORMATION
Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
This document contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws with respect to the proposed transaction between Clover Health Investments, Corp. (“Clover”) and Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp. III (“SCH”). These forward-looking statements generally are identified by the words “believe,” “project,” “expect,” “anticipate,” “estimate,” “intend,” “strategy,” “future,” “opportunity,” “plan,” “may,” “should,” “will,” “would,” “will be,” “will continue,” “will likely result,” and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are predictions, projections and other statements about future events that are based on current expectations and assumptions and, as a result, are subject to risks and uncertainties. Many factors could cause actual future events to differ materially from the forward-looking statements in this document, including but not limited to: (i) the risk that the transaction may not be completed in a timely manner or at all, which may adversely affect the price of SCH’s securities, (ii) the risk that the transaction may not be completed by SCH’s business combination deadline and the potential failure to obtain an extension of the business combination deadline if sought by SCH, (iii) the failure to satisfy the conditions to the consummation of the transaction, including the adoption of the Agreement and Plan of Merger (the “Merger Agreement”), dated as of October 5, 2020, by and among SCH, Asclepius Merger Sub Inc. and Clover, by the shareholders of SCH, the satisfaction of the minimum trust account amount following redemptions by SCH’s public shareholders and the receipt of certain governmental and regulatory approvals, (iv) the lack of a third party valuation in determining whether or not to pursue the proposed transaction, (v) the inability to complete the PIPE investment in connection with the transaction, (vi) the occurrence of any event, change or other circumstance that could give rise to the termination of the Merger Agreement, (vii) the effect of the announcement or pendency of the transaction on Clover’s business relationships, operating results and business generally, (viii) risks that the proposed transaction disrupts current plans and operations of Clover and potential difficulties in Clover employee retention as a result of the transaction, (ix) the outcome of any legal proceedings that may be instituted against Clover or against SCH related to the Merger Agreement or the transaction, (x) the ability to maintain the listing of SCH’s securities on a national securities exchange, (xi) the price of SCH’s securities may be volatile due to a variety of factors, including changes in the competitive and highly regulated industries in which SCH plans to operate or Clover operates, variations in operating performance across competitors, changes in laws and regulations affecting SCH’s or Clover’s business and changes in the combined capital structure, (xii) the ability to implement business plans, forecasts, and other expectations after the completion of the proposed transaction, and identify and realize additional opportunities, and (xiii) the risk of downturns and a changing regulatory landscape in the highly competitive healthcare industry. The foregoing list of factors is not exhaustive. You should carefully consider the foregoing factors and the other risks and uncertainties described in the “Risk Factors” section of SCH’s registration on Form S-1 (File №333–236776), the registration statement on Form S-4 discussed below and other documents filed by SCH from time to time with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”). These filings identify and address other important risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and Clover and SCH assume no obligation and do not intend to update or revise these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Neither Clover nor SCH gives any assurance that either Clover or SCH or the combined company will achieve its expectations.
Additional Information and Where to Find It
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