Interview: CEO Patrick Geraghty on Florida Blue's Transformation Into Health Solutions Company GuideWell

Since his arrival to Florida Blue in 2011, Patrick Geraghty has been leading the transformation of the company from a health insurance company to a health solutions company. A part of this transformation includes the restructuring of the organization of the enterprise to a mutual insurance holding company, GuideWell. In an interview with Tom Main, head of the Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Center, Geraghty describes his vision of the future of healthcare and his plans for his company. Read the full interview here and an excerpt below:

Being just an insurer is not necessarily an attractive place to be compared to the delivery of care, ancillary products, and consumer services. We think there’s a much bigger play for us in all of these areas. It will be done through partnerships, but we want a seat at that table because it’s critical to be able to influence the environment.

In delivery of care, I don’t mean owning hospitals, but I do mean more primary care and more ability to be involved in working best practices across our marketplace and thinking about how to scale back-office expense out of the delivery system so it can truly focus on keeping people well in the first place and delivering high quality care when it’s needed. And of course there will be plenty of new players in the places where margin appears to be available.

GuideWell, allows us to play nationally and to be involved outside of the traditional health plan products. It initially opens the door to direct delivery of care and our consumer product orientation. It allows us to really think about the broad range of health, wellness, prevention, and other kinds of products. We wanted the structure to be right, and I think the structure we’ve set up is compatible with a broad health and wellness agenda that goes well beyond insurance and the old way of thinking about health plans.

We wanted to be able to move capital out of the insurance company to the holding company, which gives us the ability to invest and move with more freedom and with greater speed and pace, which the new marketplace absolutely requires. So we’ve given ourselves tools and structure and capability to redefine ourselves, which are all very, very encouraging to those of us who see a world that’s very different from the world we’ve been playing in.