“How much time do you think you spend with your primary care physician each year?” Kent Riddle asked attendees at Paradigm Outcomes’ 2016 Innovation Symposium. The CEO of Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital looked out at the crowd as they pondered that question. He answered it for them.

“Eight minutes or less,” he said. “They have a script pad in their pockets, ready to go. And how many scripts do they write? 0.8 scripts for every visit. We have 5% of the world’s population and 90% of the drugs. It’s a real problem.”

Those surprising statistics were just a few Riddle shared with attendees in a far-reaching assessment of America’s healthcare system that also included a potential solution for reining in out-of-control healthcare costs.

Riddle spoke from the perspective of an outsider. He has owned his own commercial real estate development business, managed global real estate mergers and acquisitions for Steelcase and later co-founded a company focused on green building development for Fortune 500 companies. He likes to say it was his wife who got him into healthcare. She suffered a traumatic brain injury due to an accident caused by a drunk driver.

“She was in a coma for a few weeks and later began her recovery at Mary Free Bed. That’s when I fell in love with a culture, a mission and the staff there. I wanted to give back and be a part of it.”

His wife recovered, and Riddle was asked to be on the board and later became CEO. As he continued his address, it was apparent his indoctrination into healthcare was eye-opening for him. Statistics proved his point:

• In 1960, healthcare was 5% of the GDP. Today it’s 18% and growing.
• Since 1999, the percentage of the costs of healthcare for each person has grown fivefold.
• The average household has an income around $60,000 and spends a third of it on healthcare.
• Healthcare in America is a three trillion dollar sector. And a third of that is wasted.
• The average number of medications prescribed for an acute care discharge in the U.S. is 13.

“I always call healthcare ‘a world of ka-ching,’” Riddle said. “It’s like asking a painter to come into your living room and you telling him to just paint it and tell you what it costs later. It’s unbelievable.”

In Riddle’s previous business experience, he had opportunities to visit with visionaries such as Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Meg Whitman and David Kelley. He learned how really disruptive organizations and their leaders think, and wondered how that same thinking could be applied to healthcare.

“I’m going to propose a new term,” he said. “It’s called ‘navigated health.’”

In this care-navigation model, physiatrists—doctors who take a functional approach to physical medicine and rehabilitation, and ultimately, diagnosis evaluation—could apply their skills to keep healthy people healthy and save them money. Riddle believes this bottom-up approach to value-based care has the potential to reduce the country’s healthcare costs by a third because it attacks what he identifies as the root cause of the problem—medical and pharmaceutical costs.

“Let’s not allow a patient to go to a neurosurgeon or an orthopedic surgeon for their back problem until they’ve gone through a physiatrist and a physiatrist has tried more conservative things. Conservative, meaning less invasive. Less interventional,” he said.

Riddle argued that this type of concierge medicine is a better solution than just sending employees and their families into a healthcare system without any kind of advocacy or support. He gave an example of how that works. He spoke of a surgery that would have cost an employee $24,000 at one facility. But by using the same surgeon at a different, less expensive location, the cost was reduced to $12,000.

Riddle concluded by saying, “I think the solution to our healthcare problem has got to be a combination of care navigation and breaking it down by procedure or episode, not on the big scale but on the small. We’re driving at better outcomes, better service and lower costs.”