We talk often at Crossover about how “healthcare should be.” But what we really mean is how “health” should be. For us, not being sick is not enough. From the outset, we wanted to create a place where people embraced the idea of living the healthiest life possible, no matter what their current health status was. We captured our vision in our original tagline—Be Well. Do Good. Enjoy Life.—one we still use today.
Our journey—including a reach across all fifty states, over a thousand awesome staff, an amazing roster of activist customers, incredible care delivered anywhere—has been epic and it continues. But through all of this, we have never lost sight of our original vision, which is to transform people’s relationship to their health. It has tremendously influenced our approach to care delivery including introducing services that are both broader and more interconnected than can be found elsewhere. It also highlights our laser focus on meaningful relationships with our members so our providers are welcomed into their lives with an accessibility and approachability that doesn’t exist within the healthcare industry.
However, the positive presence of our vision and influence has been lingering in the background—until today. Starting today, we’ll be much more upfront about our longer range intentions, with the launch of Be Well (yup, the first part of our tagline).
Be Well is accessed by our members on our Crossover Platform. It’s not a fitness or health app; rather, it is the overall brand for our Lifestyle Health approach. Our Be Well umbrella arches over the entire concept of Primary Health as a membership, which can be customized for the life each of our members wants to live. It will incorporate online and in-person classes and coaching that addresses areas such as fitness, mental health, sleep, lower back pain, and so much more. We will also have a steady stream of content and insights from our care teams with a focus on helping people stay healthy. Crucially, it’s not a discrete, generic offering but instead intimately tied into each of our members’ individual health profiles, records, and experience and created by our own care teams. We see a customized Be Well engagement being prescribed by the care team but customized for each member. It is important to understand, however, that a Be Well “prescription” is as valid for the robustly healthy individual as it is for someone who is actively addressing a health issue.
More broadly, it’s a way to move beyond the practice of reactive sick care. Recently, I’ve spent a lot of time promoting the idea of changing the business model of healthcare, undoing the transactional nature of fee-for-service and the tyranny of the visit. But as you change the business model to enable more enveloping relationships and comprehensive care, shouldn’t we also change the “expectation” of what “health” is as well?
A great deal of energy is being expended within healthcare, and particularly within primary care, to address the Triple or Quadruple Aim. Lower costs, better outcomes, better patient experience, and engaged providers—you know the drill. And yet, at the end of it, the trajectory of the Quadruple Aim is simply to optimize the old paradigm of “sick care.” Basically, traditional healthcare, done better. Nothing wrong with that, but these sustaining innovations are not nearly enough.
Imagine people engaging with their health team because they are well. In addition to just changing the payment model, there’s a significant behavioral shift required for this on the part of both our members and care teams, but the benefits will be equally as powerful. A population of people engaged in their health even when they’re well is how we’ll get ahead of future health issues and come away from Primary Health being a service for the primarily sick. This is the membership, lifestyle-based service we’re creating as the future of health. It will be powered by data and insights, delivered by accountable care teams across multiple channels, and paid for by sponsors who are willing to pay for value.
In the end, reinventing healthcare should really be about increasing health—for those who are sick, and for those who are not—in order for everyone to live and Be Well
Scott Shreeve, MD 