In the wake of the Affordable Care Act, a prescription for ongoing dialogue

Olympia Snowe’s keynote, above, closes the conference. Photo by Gort Productions

With health care exchanges open for business, hundreds of policymakers, practitioners, and business leaders converged on the University of Miami to exchange another kind of currency: ideas and strategies for addressing what School of Business Administration Dean Eugene Anderson described as “the most pressing issues facing the nation in the rapidly evolving health care environment.”

Among the headliners at “The Business of Health Care: Bending the Cost Curve” conference were former U.S. Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and UM President Donna E. Shalala, U.S. secretary of health and human services from 1993 to 2001. This was the third conference in an annual series hosted by the school’s Center for Health Sector Management and Policy.

Two of the day’s three panels, held on January 17, covered how employers and health care providers are faring under the Affordable Care Act. “Employers’ three biggest concerns are cost, cost, and cost,” said panelist Helen Darling, president and CEO of National Business Group on Health, a nonprofit that advocates the views of large employers. Panelist Michael Freed, president and CEO of Priority Health and executive vice president of Spectrum Health in Michigan, said increasing the amount individuals pay for health care and improving management of chronic disease conditions are two strategies to help control costs. Lynn Britton, president and CEO of Mercy, touted the kind of technology advances his four-state health care system has employed, such as virtual care and centralized patient monitoring, as good medicine for both outcomes and costs.

Helen Darling (National Business Group on Health) and Patrick Geraghty (Florida Blue) discuss the new law’s effect on employers. Photo by Gort Productions

A third session, moderated by Shalala, explored some of the rapidly emerging costs and benefits, as well as the politics and policies behind them.

Professor Steven G. Ullmann, the director of the business school’s health sector center, emphasized the importance of discourse. “We all have much to learn from each other, and this is an excellent forum to facilitate those discussions,” he said.

In her keynote address, Snowe, a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, called for greater cooperation in Washington. “We have to do better as a country,” she said. “We have to pay attention to the big issues, find common ground, and move forward.”

Roughly 700 executives attended the conference at UM’s BankUnited Center. David Spillers, M.B.A. ’02, came from out of state to attend. “I learned that the issues we are facing in Alabama are similar to those in South Florida,” said the CEO of Huntsville Hospital Health System. “The conference was very helpful in stimulating my thinking about what we as a health system can do to reduce costs while continuing to improve the quality of care.”

To access video and white papers from all panels, visit bus.miami.edu/healthcare2014.

The post Taking Health Care’s Temperature appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

Heart Alert

Early detection is key when it comes to heart attacks. Now the University of Miami Health System is conducting a clinical trial on a device designed to track significant changes in the heart’s electrical signal and alert patients to seek medical attention—even if they aren’t experiencing obvious or typical symptoms. The investigational study of the AngelMed Guardian monitor will play a significant role in FDA approval. The subcutaneous device connected inside of the heart would be able to detect any cardiac changes that indicate a heart attack is about to occur, says Claudia A. Martinez Bermudez, who heads this UHealth clinical trial. Initial studies suggest the monitor could help reduce the time it takes potential heart attack patients to get to a hospital from the current average of two to three hours to just 20 minutes.

Crash Diet

Can stressful headlines expand your waistline? That’s the conclusion of a study Juliano Laran, assistant professor of marketing in the School of Business Administration, conducted with doctoral student Anthony Salerno. Their research, published in the February edition of the journal Psychological Science, suggests that bad news triggers a “live for today” impulse that leads people to eat more—and to eat higher-calorie foods with the expectation the sustenance will last longer. Subjects subconsciously primed with information about adversity during a mock taste test consumed nearly 40 percent more high-calorie food than those primed with neutral messages. Within the adversity information group, those asked to taste a “higher-calorie candy” ate nearly 70 percent more compared with those in the group offered a “lower-calorie” version of the candy to try (in reality, both received regular M&Ms). The neutral message control groups consumed roughly the same amount of chocolate, regardless of purported calorie content. Laran says it wasn’t taste but “a longing for calories” that caused the reactions.

Strokes & Stems

The first two stroke patients have been enrolled in a phase 2 clinical trial of a revolutionary new treatment for ischemic stroke being conducted by the University of Miami at Jackson Memorial Hospital. The trial, using a patient’s own bone marrow stem cells, is the first intra-arterial stroke stem cell trial in the U.S., and the two patients at UM at Jackson are the first in Florida to participate. The trial, being led by Dileep Yavagal, assistant professor of neurology and neurological surgery, is examining the efficacy of ALD-401, derived from bone marrow and manufactured by Aldagen, to repair and regenerate tissue following an ischemic event.

HIV Discovery

Left untreated, HIV almost always progresses to AIDS in humans. Yet about one in 300 HIV-infected people control the virus after an initial burst of viral replication, even without medications. The mystery of how these individuals, known as “elite controllers,” suppress the rapidly adapting virus is answered in a seminal study published in the journal Nature. David I. Watkins, professor of pathology, and his team discovered that elite controllers generate a “killer cell” CD8+ T response against a few small regions of the virus, successfully controlling it. Watkins adds that understanding this mechanism may shed light on how to develop an effective HIV/AIDS vaccine. He and colleagues in Brazil are working on a vaccine with support from a $10 million National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases grant.

The post R+D Update appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

Citizen ’Cane

Adaptation Is Key for New UM Trustee

After a long career in the technology industry, T. Kendall “Ken” Hunt, B.B.A. ’65, founded VASCO Data Security International, a software company that provides online authentication and e-signature solutions. Today he is chairman and CEO of the Chicago-based enterprise, which serves 10,000 businesses in 110 countries, including major banks, government agencies, and health care organizations.

A member of the UM President’s Council and School of Business Administration’s Board of Overseers, Hunt was elected alumni trustee on the Alumni  Board of Directors in 2012.

He says that, in the tech arena, it pays to adapt and to “never give up”—lessons he grasped early. “I was attending the University of Miami on a football scholarship and was a starting halfback with a reasonably good chance of playing in the pros,” relates Hunt. “Then, on a visit to a firing range, someone accidentally shot me in the leg with an automatic, shattering the bone just above the ankle. It put an end to my plans for football. I wasn’t happy, but I decided to reinvent myself as a focused student working toward a business degree and a business career.”

Hunt’s degree led to a good job at IBM, then to a technology-services corporation, where he eventually headed up a $220 million global division. From there he was recruited as CEO of an electronic-training-solutions company.

A disagreement with its founder about strategy caused Hunt to launch his own consulting firm at age 41. In 1989 he came across a struggling startup whose security technology could generate one-time passwords for people making network connections. He bought the venture by taking out a second mortgage on his home. “That was the start of VASCO,” he recalls.

The company soared with the rise of the Internet and online banking—until the 2008 financial sector crash. “Once again, it was time to take stock,” Hunt says. Instead of cutting back, he expanded into Turkey, Spain, Chile, and India, and invested in a cloud-based authentication product—more bold moves in a lifetime of successful adaptation.

“In some ways,” Hunt reflects, “getting shot in the leg may be one of the most important and instructive things that ever happened to me.”

—Peter Haapaniemi (From BusinessMiami)

The post Adaptation Is Key for New UM Trustee appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

CPS Energy is bringing new energy, like Centennial Solar Farm, to San Antonio. Photos by Vincent McDonald/CPS Energy

For Doyle Beneby, M.B.A. ’97, being bullish on alternative energy deep in the heart of oil country isn’t a paradox; it’s just good business sense.

The Texas-sized CEO (he’s 6’5”) is bringing seemingly immovable forces—environmentalists and fossil-fuel-friendly executives—to negotiations in the Lone Star State’s second-biggest city. In the process he’s making serious strides toward meeting San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro’s challenge to pump up the use of low-carbon fuels by 2020.

As the head of CPS Energy, the nation’s largest combined municipal utility company (gas and electric), Beneby has fast gained a reputation for supporting traditional low-impact energy sources like wind and solar as well as fossil fuels that are cleaner and safer than their predecessors.

To that end, CPS Energy recently spent $500 million to buy a clean-burning natural gas plant, a move that should enable its 35-year-old coal-burning facility to be retired about a decade ahead of schedule.

“Rather than spend a half-billion dollars retrofitting an old plant, we chose to invest in newer technology with renewable energy and natural gas options,” explains Beneby, who was named 2012 Utility CEO of the Year by the Solar Electric Power Association. “As a municipal utility, we can take a longer view and make strategic decisions looking out over the next decade or two. Because we don’t have to answer to a quarterly earnings call, our investment decisions are driven by choices that benefit our company and customers over the long run.”

Some of those long-range benefits, he notes, include fewer regulations and lower environmental impact.

The strategy has drawn national and international players. Beneby brokered a deal with two South Korea-owned firms to build a solar-power field with the capacity to service 80,000 homes. The plan includes the creation of solar-cell company Nexolon’s first American manufacturing plant, expected to bring at least 800 new jobs and $38 million in annual payroll to San Antonio.

Since Beneby joined CPS Energy in August 2010 from private Chicago-based utility company Exelon, where he served as energy division president, at least eight clean-technology energy operations have set up shop in San Antonio, potentially adding more than 2,000 area jobs. With this kind of buzz, the city may become known as the nation’s alternative-energy capital, and Texas could break into the top five solar-producing states.

Still, Beneby says he never intended to become a leader in clean energy. At each turn, though, it just seemed to be the right move, particularly when it came with the bonus of attracting businesses and jobs.

But, warns the Miami native and former engineer for Florida Power & Light, “It can’t be all innovation. You have to do the basics well, too, and I’m fortunate to be working for one of the best utilities in the business.

“If CPS Energy does all of these other things, but the grid goes down and people lose power for a day, then we haven’t done our job well,” Beneby continues. “I’ll admit, though, it is fun having both responsibilities. Articulating a vision and now highlighting my new hometown, San Antonio, as a model for what the industry can do—that is fulfillment.” —Robert Strauss

CPS Energy’s CEO Doyle Beneby, M.B.A. ’97

The post Alumnus Leads Charge in Texas appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.