Highlights: Highmark Health

Highmark Inc. and its subsidiaries and affiliates provide health insurance to approximately 6.8 million members in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Delaware, and parts of New York, as well as dental insurance and related health products through a national network of diversified businesses.

Allegheny Health Network is an integrated delivery network comprised of 14 hospitals, more than 2,600 affiliated physicians, ambulatory surgery centers, an employed physician organization, home and community-based health services, a research institute, a group purchasing organization, and health and wellness pavilions in western Pennsylvania. HM Health Solutions is focused on meeting the information technology platform and other business needs of the Highmark Health enterprise as well as unaffiliated health insurance plans, by providing proven business processes, expert knowledge, and integrated cloud-based platforms.

Highmark Health's vision is a world where everyone embraces health. Its mission is to create a remarkable health experience, freeing people to be their best. Through its structure as a blended health organization, it is uniquely positioned to pioneer new models and transform the health care industry to work better now and for generations to come. The financial overview and financial performance information in this annual report demonstrate the financial strength of the enterprise, which allows it to invest to meet the needs of customers and strategically align with health industry innovators and leaders who share its focus on delivering high-quality outcomes and an exceptional customer experience.

Highmark Health also carries forward a long legacy of community giving and investment. For example, Highmark Health and its subsidiaries and affiliates have invested nearly $1.4 billion to support customers, providers, and communities since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"The collaboration with Verily and Google Cloud is the ideal trifecta of expertise that will enable us to create and deliver a remarkable health experience for patients through a holistic, digitally enabled, personalized set of solutions," explained Karen Hanlon, Highmark Health's chief operating officer. She added that these solutions will also enable clinicians and health teams to better customize care and be more proactive in supporting each individual's health journey.

While many others are also investing in digital health solutions, one distinguishing quality of Living Health has been strong clinician leadership and participation. That includes "blended health" collaborations with provider systems that go beyond traditional payer-provider agreements and involve not only a shared mission, but varying levels of shared infrastructure. A game-changing example: the 2021 launch of a 10-year joint venture with ChristianaCare, another leading innovator in value-based, data-driven care delivery.

Like all manifestations of the Living Health strategy, the blended health entity with ChristianaCare starts with the premise that people and their clinicians must be at the center of systemic transformation. Dr. Janice E. Nevin, president and CEO of ChristianaCare, described the new entity as "a problem-solving company that will take cost and inefficiencies out of the system, aligning everything around what's right for the patient. It will enable much stronger, continuous connections between people and their health care providers."

Although still early in the long-term development of a continuously evolving platform, the Living Health model has attracted attention from funders as well as collaborators. For example, in 2021, the Richard King Mellon Foundation awarded Highmark Health a $5 million grant specifically to "deploy holistic, digitally enabled, personalized health support programs and increased access to such services as part of its Living Health strategy."

"Holistic" is another distinguishing quality of Living Health. "Our goal is to develop curated, data-based, personalized, clinician-prescribed and fully integrated solutions for promoting and preserving a person's whole health — physical, mental, and social," explained Dr. Tony Farah, Highmark Health's chief medical and clinical transformation officer.

While noteworthy on their own, these and other developments around Living Health during 2021 gain even deeper significance in laying the groundwork for what promises to be an exciting period of accelerated innovation and reimagining the health experience in the years ahead.