Oak Street Health

Hospitals profit when patients return. Oak Street Health inverted this. The company gets paid a fixed annual amount per patient to keep them healthy. No visits means no problem. More visits means less profit. This is fundamentally different from traditional insurance. Oak Street hired primary care doctors and embedded nurses into communities. Nurses made house calls to elderly patients, catching infections before they became pneumonia, spotting falls before they broke hips. Hospital readmissions dropped, costs per patient fell by 20 to 40%. CVS recognized the math. An insurer's profit depends on keeping enrolled patients healthy without spending everything on care.