Dr. Marty Makary To Headline The Alliance 2021 Spring Symposium On May 6

MADISON, WI. (April 28, 2021) – The Alliance is proud to host New York Times best-selling author and chief surgical oncologist at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Marty Makary, to keynote their 2021 Spring Symposium on May 6, 2021.

At the event, Dr. Makary will be discussing the future of payment in health care, the importance of primary care, employee steerage, and appropriateness of care in medicine at the event.

Dr. Makary is a leading advocate for health care transparency and was awarded the 2020 Business Book of the Year for The Price We Pay, which explains the issues driving up health care in America and the solutions to fix it. Dr. Makary is also a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health and is a leading voice for physicians in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today, and is Editor-in-Chief of Medpage Today. Dr. Makary has published over 250 articles on medical innovation, quality measurement, and health care costs. He served in leadership roles at the World Health Organization and has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine. He leads several national grants on health care transparency and the re-design of health care. He was also the recipient of the Nobility in Science Award from the National Pancreas Foundation.

The Alliance Spring Symposium is an annual event for employers that self-fund their health benefits. It provides self-funded employers the opportunity to learn from and connect with other like-minded organizations. This year’s Spring Symposium will be held virtually on May 6 from 9:00am–11:00am.

Gerald Frye, CEO of The Benefit Services Group, Sarah Delaney, Vice President of Analytical Services at Marsh & McLennan, and Sara Hames, Consultant at NBS Advisors, LLC., will also speak at the event and discuss how employers can use proven strategies rooted in data science to make better benefit purchasing decisions. Cheryl DeMars, President & CEO of The Alliance, will speak about The RAND Hospital Price Transparency Project, and how employers can – and should – submit their claims data to the ongoing study.

The RAND Hospital Price Transparency Project is an ongoing national, employer-led initiative to measure and publicly report the prices paid by commercial payers for hospital care at the hospital and service line level. For this study, RAND used 2016 to 2018 data from all but one state in the United States, covering $23.7 billion in hospital spending from three sources—self-funded employers, state-based all payer claims databases, and health plans. The study is designed to provide hospital price transparency to the commercial market by identifying hospitals by name. 

The Alliance serves as the voice for self-funded employers who want more control over their health care costs. They provide transparent, creative approaches to network and benefit plan design to unlock savings where others can’t – or won’t – using Smarter Networks℠ and sophisticated data mining and analysis. The Alliance is owned by 285+ employers across the Midwest and remains a trusted, objective partner for employers and their brokers who seek improved access to high-quality health care, contracting with over 31,000 health care providers and doctors in the region.