Collaboration for the Win Yankee Alliance President and CEO Larry Kaufman believes there’s more value for healthcare stakeholders in working together than remaining insular. BY DANIEL BEAIRD
Larry Kaufman has been president and CEO of Andover, Massachusetts-based Yankee Alliance, a national GPO and certified sponsor of Premier, Inc., for a little over a year, taking the helm last February, after former president and CEO Cathy Spinney retired. He has a demonstrated history of creating patient-focused cultures for serving health systems, most recently as president and CEO of Trivergent Health Alliance MSO in Maryland and 35 years with HCA Healthcare and HealthTrust, the HCA-initiated national GPO. After more than 20 years running hospitals at the C-suite level for HCA, Kaufman moved into the CEO role for the eastern U.S. for HealthTrust and his responsibilities expanded to non-HCA facilities. “That gave me exposure to a lot of organizations from Miami to Maine that had their unique challenges,” he said. “And states in between like Georgia that suffered from a large number of critical access facilities closing over the last several years and that was pre-COVID. Just challenges upon challenges, and then COVID hit.” Trivergent gave him the opportunity to work with a group of hospitals in Maryland to centralize some of their enterprises like supply chain, pharmacy, and laboratory operations. “The idea being that we are better together. That gets more important over time,” Kaufman said. “It was doubly important in Maryland because Maryland is the only state in the U.S. that has a capitated approach to healthcare. That kind of population health focus drew me there.” Maryland operates the nation’s only all-payer hospital rate regulation system. Under a 36-year-old Medicare waiver that exempts Maryland from the Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) and Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) and allows the state to set rates for these services, all third parties paid the same rate. CMS and Maryland partnered to modernize the state’s unique all-payer rate-setting system for hospital services that aimed to improve patients’ health and reduce costs, and updated the waiver to allow Maryland to adopt new policies that reduced per capita hospital expenditures and improved health outcomes.
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