Oscar of Ohio

Mario Schlosser, CEO and Co-founder of Oscar – June 15, 2017

Somewhere along the way, as costs crept higher and a complex of consultants tested what the system could bear, health care in America lost sight of the individual.

For Josh and me, it took as little as a few maddeningly inscrutable insurance notices to seed the idea of Oscar. But we knew that under this broken system, many Americans have endured far worse. That’s why we started Oscar – to try and take an outlandishly expensive, outrageously complicated system and restore its focus on the needs of the member. That meant putting ourselves right in the middle of it all, as an insurer, and redefining what a health insurance company was.

Five years in, we’ve built Oscar to be an insurer that engages members in their health and proactively guides them through the system. Instead of passing higher costs on to individuals and employers, we’re focused on empowering our members to access and choose better, more affordable care. We’re rejecting the usual route of broad network contracts of varied quality, and choosing to partner with a select few of the best hospitals and doctors to give members a curated experience. It’s only through this kind of deep integration with our provider partners that we can ensure members get the care they need in the clinical setting they need.

We’re encouraged that this approach is continuing to bear fruit. Starting this fall, Oscar is working with the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic to offer a unique healthcare experience that puts your insurance company on the same team as you and your doctor. Our new, co-branded Cleveland Clinic | Oscar health plans, expected to be offered to consumers in northeast Ohio this fall, will pair Oscar with a health system run by 3,500 of the best doctors in the country.

We’re excited to learn from Cleveland Clinic. The Clinic has set the global standard for clinical excellence and innovation in healthcare, all while orienting every detail of the organization in service of the patient. Celebrated across the world today for its innovation, research, and quality of care, the Clinic was started as a group practice with four WWI medics who believed doctors should collaborate to help patients. Nearly 100 years later, even as it expanded to three different continents, the Clinic is still distinguished by a simple, guiding principle: Patients First.

The new Cleveland Clinic | Oscar health plans will bring us both closer to our vision of what better healthcare looks like. We believe that strengthening the quality of care and access to it requires a relentless focus on the member/patient. By linking a member engagement platform to a first-rate health system, we can deliver a seamless, unified health care experience — one that can improve health outcomes, lower costs, and make it easier than ever for the member to navigate the system.

This is not the kind of agreement that will live only on paper. Over the next several months, Oscar engineers, designers, clinicians, and data scientists will work side by side with Cleveland Clinic’s teams as we both ensure every touchpoint delivers easy, affordable, and guided care.

• Every new Cleveland Clinic | Oscar member will be matched with both a Cleveland Clinic Care Team — a dedicated primary care doctor and care managers — and an Oscar Concierge team, with a nurse and three care guides.
• Every new Cleveland Clinic | Oscar member will have free, 24/7 access to Doctor on Call and Cleveland Clinic’s Express Care Online, optimized care search tools, and a beautifully designed mobile experience that empowers them to be in control of their care.
• Every new Cleveland Clinic | Oscar member will have access to the prestigious Cleveland Clinic network, with over 3,500 full-time physicians and 14,000 nurses across 140 specialties and subspecialties, a 165-acre main campus and community hospitals, family health centers, and health and wellness centers in the five counties of service.

The Cleveland Clinic | Oscar plans will, pending regulatory approval, be available for enrollment both on and off the exchanges for individuals in Cuyahoga, Summit, Lorain, Medina, and Lake counties in northeastern Ohio starting on November 1, 2017.

There’s still work to be done, but we couldn’t have found a better partner than Cleveland Clinic in its clinical excellence and commitment to the patient. As we continue to bring Oscar into the lives of more Americans, and spur the kind of change that restores the focus of our health care system on the people it’s meant to serve, we’ll be bound by a similar principle — Members First.