Is whole health here to stay, or is it a shiny new object? Our guest today is Dr. Shantanu Agrawal, Chief Health Officer at Elevance Health. He falls soundly on the “here to stay” side of the ledger. He shares that whole health is not a side business for Elevance Health and the approximately 117 million people it serves. It is the core strategy for how the company will achieve value and affordability. And it’s also what patients want.

We dive into:   

• Whether the US could get better outcomes at the same cost by redirecting resources from medical to social care

• Why and how Elevance Health developed its Whole Health Index

• Elevance Health Foundation’s three-part focus: maternal health, food as medicine and substance use disorders

• The need for a new quality paradigm that measures whole health, not clinical care for individual body parts

Shantanu calls for a deeper look at US health spending and outcomes compared to other countries:

“People often make this comparison, ‘well, our health outcomes are generally worse, we spend a lot of money in health care’. However, when you actually look at the total expense on health and social care across all these countries, it actually looks pretty similar. We are more on par with our peers, or they're more on par with us from a cost standpoint. But it is true - our health outcomes are worse. Well, why is that? Well, maybe it's because we've emphasized health care, and not care of a person's health, which means being inclusive of social and being upstream and working earlier in their life. Perhaps if we do this, we will right size the equation for our country.”