Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to Align for Impact. I'm your host, Matthew Naylor. I started this podcast because healthcare and leadership both come down to the same thing. Alignment. When people, purpose and performance connect, real impact happens.
On this show, we'll talk with entrepreneurs, brokers, and change makers who are challenging what is broken in healthcare and in business and find new ways to make a difference for companies, communities, and the people they serve.
So, welcome back to the show. I'm Matt Naylon, your host today. This is where we discuss with our guest their passion, their purpose, their happiness, their joy, their life, and how they're making an impact on themselves personally and professionally.
I'm excited to welcome our guest today.
Rod Strada is with gdk, a really amazing employee benefits and financial services firm in Canton, Ohio. Rod, welcome to the show.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you, Matt. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: So, Rod, I love just icebreakers and beginning with something, you know, fairly easy. But you've gone from campus life and college recruiting, if I'm remembering your story correctly.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: And now leading the benefits strategy for a hugely successful firm in Canton, Ohio. Can we just start there? How did you pivot from campus life and recruiting to. Yeah, Employee benefits and insurance.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: Interesting. Yeah. So ironically, even one small step before that. So I graduated college in 2009, spring of 09.
And spring of nine was a tough time to find a job for college graduates because of the 08 recession. So there was not a lot of hiring going on at the time. I went to college at a. At a school called the University of Mount Union. So Division 3 football team, that's pretty well known. They.
They won a lot of national championships back then, but.
So I started out doing disposable medical equipment sales, urological, diabetic testing. I sold ostomy supplies all over the phone.
Insulin pumps, stuff like that.
Had to make a hundred plus calls a day. Just after a while just really wears you down, I think after about 18 months or two years.
So I can't.
[00:02:42] Speaker A: I'm chuckling because that is.
I love interviewing people. And one of my interview questions, Rod, is to young salespeople is, do you like cold calling? Yeah.
And the second they say, oh, yeah, we love cold calling, I'm like, you're not higher.
[00:02:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:58] Speaker A: Because there's nobody in the world.
And it is the most difficult thing to do. I mean, you're speaking from real experience where, you know, you're doing hundreds of calls every day and people are hanging up on you.
[00:03:10] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: Not being very nice.
[00:03:12] Speaker B: Not. Not being very nice.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Really, really difficult job.
[00:03:16] Speaker B: I I agree with you. What did that teach?
[00:03:18] Speaker A: I'm sorry, but what did that teach you?
[00:03:20] Speaker B: You know, it, it was, it was, it definitely gets you out of your comfort zone. So, I mean, I, it for. I learned a lot, but just picking up the phone, calling. Call, you know, calling. I mean, you talked to a lot of different people and a lot of people were not nice. But a lot of people were nice. I mean, they're still. Yeah, I think you kind of learned that. Okay, there's, there's a lot of jerks, but there's also a lot of really nice people in this country. We called all over the country. So it, you know, the, the people in North Carolina were really nice.
Normally, people in New York were a little tougher. Right? I mean, it was not. Probably not.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: Well, I'm wearing my Eagles green.
[00:03:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: Philly shoes today. So when you say New York, I'm like, okay, that's fine. We can, we can.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: I know I have a lot of respect for Philly, for Eagles fans. Yeah, the Eagles are better than the Giants, right? I mean, that's.
[00:04:04] Speaker A: Yeah, that's for now. You know, fans are fickle. You better keep winning or.
[00:04:11] Speaker B: But yeah, I started there and then I got out of that and actually went back to. And I did do recruiting at Mount Union for a period of time. And during that time I also worked on getting my, my MBA at a school by my. Where I was living in North Canton called Walsh University.
So I did that for about. Yeah, it was two year program.
Ironically, during that time, I, I was trying to figure out what. I'm not going to do this forever either.
So trying to figure out, okay, I need to find something that I feel is a little more career like.
So I was living in my dad's house at the time. He was working at SAP Software. He worked in Singapore and Japan for four years for SAP. So he was not there. I'm living there, which is great. We drive to Twinsburg every day, you know, hour drive or whatever, commute. And my dad's next door neighbor pulls up in his driveway, hey, I'm looking for your dad. Is he around? No, he's not around.
Older gentleman, really nice Mercedes because, you know. How old are you?
23 as well. What do you, what do you do for a living?
Well, I mean, you know, I'm doing college recruiting, this thing. Well, if you ever want to make some real money, you give me a call. I thought, who the hell is this guy? You know, who the heck's this guy? So time goes by and then I said, you know what, let me reach out to this guy because I want to get out of doing this. So I reached out to him. Going to interview, ironically, one of the partners at the time of our agency. So his name was Stan Greenwald. He's since passed away about a year and a half ago. But he founded our firm in the 60s, so he originally started it on a life insurance basis.
We had been doing benefits since the, you know, Constance benefits really started becoming, I guess employee benefits became a thing. So 70s, 80s range.
So yeah, he. I went an interview, talked to Stan, ironically, one of our partners at the time, Don Ditemire, I had in class at Mount Union. He was one of my professors for a course, which was ironic.
So it all kind of worked out and yeah. So about April of 2012, started working in the insurance business. Not ever thinking, knowing anything about it in the insurance. Yeah.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: How big was the firm in 2012?
[00:06:29] Speaker B: We were probably about six to eight employees.
We're a smaller.
We weren't pretty lean. So we're a smaller shop, I would say. But yeah, so about about six to eight people. They used to own a TPA before that. So they're. We were, I think at one time we're 25 to 30.
[00:06:49] Speaker A: Okay. And how many people do you have now?
[00:06:51] Speaker B: We have 10.
[00:06:52] Speaker A: 10.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: So yeah, 11 if you count are. We have an underwriter who's a 1099 who works out of Florida for us.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: And a lot of your focus is on small to mid sized employers in Ohio. Yeah. That are either fully insured or level funded or self funded, is that correct?
[00:07:07] Speaker B: Yeah, we have a lot of groups that are in the 2 to 50, but we have. Most of our groups are somewhere between probably between 10 and 250. 10 to 500 would be the. We don't usually go north of 500 employees.
Just a lot more competition in that space and just don't find the success rates where it needs to be for us to actively engage there.
[00:07:27] Speaker A: So I think I saw something that you posted around transparency and I think the post was something like, hey, I can drive across town and fill up my car and it's going to cost me 60 cents a gallon to fill up my car.
But I can't drive across town and grab an MRI.
[00:07:50] Speaker B: Right.
[00:07:51] Speaker A: You know, and it's 2500 bucks or 3500 bucks. Why, why can't I know that I can just drive across town.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: Right.
[00:07:59] Speaker A: And get an MRI at the other place for, you know, whatever. $400. Yeah, I think that was something around what you were saying in your post, but transparency is a real issue in health care.
[00:08:10] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:08:11] Speaker A: Just touch on that a little bit and like your. Your approach and your perspective and what you kind of what you have seen retrospectively, but like what you're hoping to see more prospectively with the market.
[00:08:23] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah, That's a great question. So I think historically, certainly it's pretty well known, I think in healthcare that transparency is. Is an issue. Biggest reason being to your point.
We hear it all the time. You have a person that goes and gets a claim, an MRI or a CAT scan. And I use myself as an example. I had to forget a period of time I'd have to get CAT scans a lot.
And so I was going to one by my house, Akron General, which is now Cleveland Clinic, and it would. I had a think. I had a $2,000 deductible. The total charges were $5,000. I would meet my deductible every time I went to go to get the CAT scan done. Right. Just like clockwork.
So then I decided to finally look, we had a transparency to what the carrier we were with at the time, and there's a place down the street from our office who does basically the same cat scan for $400.
[00:09:12] Speaker A: What is the transparency tool? Like what. What is it? What does the technology do? What is it providing to you, your clients?
[00:09:19] Speaker B: Yeah, so some carriers have their own.
We have. There's other tools that we. That we look at. So the, the whole idea with the transparency tool is to. Basically, to your point, if you think about the gas analogy, I know there's apps like Gas Buddy or other apps that will tell you what the cost of gas is anywhere that you go. Well, these tools basically do the same thing, right? They say, okay, hey, if you go over here, your, Your cat, your estimated cost for your CAT scan would be x.
Maybe it's 5,000, maybe it's 2,000, maybe it's 400.
So we can. You can help steer people to say, hey, you don't have to go here. There's nothing mandating you to go get the 400 CAT scan, but you should at least know that you have the option. And for most people today, I mean, I know for me at the time, if it was right around Christmas, I figured that out and I thought, okay, I just saved, you know, almost $2,000 out of my own pocket because I took 10 minutes to look something up. I mean, I don't make $2,000 an hour.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. What a wonderful thing to give to the consumer you know, your employer groups and their members that, you know, the average employee making 50, 60, $70,000 a year with a high deductible of 2 or 4 or $6,000, those out of pocket costs are significant. And giving that consumer technology at the point of incident to be able to say, hey, where should I go? Yeah, and how much is it going to cost and how do I save money? Do. Do the transparency tools also provide any level of advocacy or showing the member like, hey, this facility is rated this way, this facility is rated that way. So not only giving them price, but educating them on the providers?
[00:11:09] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a couple that do factor in some clinical components that will basically say, okay, this, this clinical or this site that your providers are going to has had a higher success rate and they pull a lot of different metrics. I think it's. The clinical side's tough. I think there's not a real great grading system on that, but they go off at least enough statistics to say, okay, the, if somebody has a surgery with this person, their readmission or their, their rate of having to get a revision done or different things is lower than over here. So there is, some of the tools will do that.
And I mean, any time we can provide that. It's not accessible for every provider, but if we can find that, certainly want to share that with people.
[00:11:57] Speaker A: I'm going to change gears a little bit, Rod, but you're an athlete, you love big sports. You're a big sports fan. Whether it's football, golf, skiing, playing sports, being active, it really feels like that's the way you've been your whole entire life.
How has that translated for you in business?
[00:12:16] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. So I think sports, to me, I played football and baseball growing up, played a bunch of other sports when I was younger, but I played football and baseball. I played, um, I think the team sport environment, you know, that teaches you a lot about life and about business, of not just you. You're driving yourself to be the best you can be, not just for you, but also for your team. Right. You're, you're. I'm pushing myself to be the best person I can be for myself, my family, but also the people I work with because I care about them and I want them to succeed if, you know, along with me or help push them to be better as well. Right. We want to carry each other and move forward and.
But I think sports teach you a lot about toughness, to your point, about grit.
I mean, you have, you learn a lot and it's not always easy. You have to push yourself further than you probably thought you could, but you kind of keep learning from that and building on that and kind of just take that and apply it to everyday life.
[00:13:12] Speaker A: That's great. That's great.
The health insurance business is really not for the faint of heart. And what I mean by that is healthcare inflation is a real thing. And it's really, for employers, it's typically the second largest line item on their, you know, their balance sheet. And it's also really painful for the members. It's out of pocket. Costs are. And when you look at health care inflation and you compare it to wages, it's outpacing everything.
[00:13:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:50] Speaker A: Rob, what are you and your firm doing that's innovative and creative to help people like, reduce cost, create a better outcome for themselves, but also creating a better experience for the member?
[00:14:03] Speaker B: Yeah, another very good question. So I would say especially just take an average size case and just maybe a company with a hundred employees. Right. And I think for most employers today, their challenges, especially whoever's in charge of the healthcare plan or benefits at their company, they don't know what they don't know.
And so they just renew, renew here, renew there. If they're fully insured, just kind of keep taking big increases, trend increases, and that could be 8 to 10 to 12% every year. You do that for eight years, your plan, your costs went from here all the way up. Right?
So I mean, our big thing with, to me, we start working with employers and at least start pulling back the curtain, understanding, why are you here? How did you, how did you get to this point? Why are your rates so high? Understand what your risk is. So whether that's through claims data or whether that's through, I guess sometimes medical apps or form fire are saying, okay, here's, here's what we have going on. Here's where the industry's at with claims. So, and here's kind of the game plan we would recommend for you to start. Let's start walking down this path so we can figure out how do we control your costs a little bit better? So to your point, we're firm believers in controlling the cost for the company also means controlling costs for the employees, which is big. And I mean, for a lot of employees, they feel like they don't even have insurance. They have a $5,000 deductible.
Maybe it's an HSA. They don't have enough to put into the HSA.
So they feel like when they go to the doctor and they get a bill for $200. What am I paying all this money for? And that's really frustrating for them. It's a bad experience for them.
So controlling the cost and figuring that out, but on the back end to be able to do that, we look at, I guess what I would consider innovative solutions. So we will look at anything and everything from doing specialty medication carve outs, doing different types of high claimant migration tools that really benefit the member who's going through a difficult time. And it was maybe a bad diagnosis. Whether that's a cancer diagnosis or a high, they're not going to be high utilizers for the next year.
Doing all those things to help control and shape the risk is really important.
And that really, that allows us to kind of take that and start, at least start the process of instead of just going straight up and we starting to flatten the curve. And then the more that we understand your risk, the more we can try to maybe bring that back down. We call it resetting the floor. We like to try to reset their floor as much as we can.
[00:16:35] Speaker A: It's funny, big insurance companies, big PBMs get a lot of bad press.
Even hospitals, when you think about that ecosystem, Big Blue Cross and Aetna, United Sega, they're really great companies. They're good people, they have good intentions. If you think about the big PBMs, ESI, Optum, CVs, really good people, really good companies. You think about big health systems, same thing.
It's hard for them to be innovative and creative and disruptive.
That's going to make a meaningful difference to an employer. Can you tell us a little bit about what you and your firm are doing to really bend that cost curve? Knowing that the larger providers not necessarily have bad intent, but maybe a little misaligned with the small employer.
[00:17:33] Speaker B: Yeah, misaligns a good border. So really it starts to work with vendors like Blake Crumbdale, different. Other vendors like that are looking at this a little bit differently, that are putting, I would call strategies and different components in place that align with the end user. I think that aligns a great word because I do think a lot of the bigger carriers, hospitals, providers do not do that. So working with a company like Chromedale, where we can say, okay, just take the integrated healthcare solution, we can kind of look at that and say, all right, we know that if we have somebody who comes through who has a really popular drug. I see right now, Skyrizi for psoriasis, it's about $21,000 a fill. If you don't have Any type of cost containment or carve out or sourcing on that.
Well, if that comes through, if you're on a, I won't pick out one specifically, but if you're on a traditional BUCA plan, that's going to come through and they're going to pay the 21,000 every time and just going to keep flowing through. Right. And the employer's going to pay that. Whereas you look at a solution, take what Crumbdale is doing, that comes through, well, hey, is there a better way to handle this drug?
Can we get this person on a patient assistance program where they can access the drug but it doesn't cost the plan anything? If we can't, can we source that drug?
And if we can source it, and I've seen it sourced before, where you go from $21,000 to $6,700 sourcing that drug, that's a massive impact to the employer's bottom line. Right. And not only that, but the member is getting a better experience actually accessing the drug or getting it from the either pharmacy or mail order because the specialty pharmacy.
So I think that the big thing is to your point about alignment, it's finding the right partners to say okay, can we look at this a little bit better? Can we do things that will cost contain so the employer is just not eating everything that's coming through.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: What I love about what you're saying Rod, is the alignment around everybody winning. You the broker, bringing a innovative, creative, unique solution to an employer where they have huge spend on healthcare.
The employer saving significant money on their total cost of care, the member getting the exact same drug, solving a problem around their high deductible where you're lowering their out of pocket cost and almost a really white glove experience to the member making sure it's not disruptive. You know, so often members have real challenges with pre authorization and access to care.
You know that it's a really, Tell me a little bit about what you're doing around member engagement and advocacy. Because I, I, I think what we see is healthcare is very difficult to understand even for people that are in it agree and engaging members is a really difficult thing.
[00:20:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:42] Speaker A: And so what, what are you and your firm doing around advocacy? A little bit for the member experience?
[00:20:47] Speaker B: Yeah, so we try to do, I mean northeast Ohio, we're, we're pretty old school I would say. It's a pretty, it's a pretty traditional area. So I, we, we have different programs and third party solutions that we engage in that we will offer to groups. We also have, you know, we offer employee navigator to our group so they, from a quick comparison standpoint and kind of ease of enrollment, getting the information in front of them outside of just handing out paper, which, which we still have a lot of groups that want paper. Again, it's pretty old school area, but we go on site. So we're really big believers in going on site as well. So the, the standard open enrollment meeting historically isn't quite good enough anymore. One time a year, nobody understands everything's going over their head. Especially if they're a 1:1 and you're around the holidays, they're not remembering anything you're talking about. They're just going to make their election and move on. And nobody really understands healthcare until they use it. Right. That's always the thing. Until you actually go to a provider and use your card and go through and you really don't understand how it all works.
So we try to do either monthly or quarterly breakouts at groups to just go over different topics. Billing's a big one of them or a big one.
And we'll even look at the bills and invoices. If somebody feels like something's wrong, we encourage their HR team to send us. Hey, we'll take a look. I can tell you within 10 seconds if something's wrong or not or if it looks correct. But at least just getting that assurance of am I paying too much? Am I, is this right? Was my insurance even billed? Half the time it's not. The insurance is not even billed yet and they're sending an invoice out.
[00:22:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: So we try to do different touch points, whether that's in person, technology or engaging a third party that'll kind of do some different, different things that we, different marketing pieces we can get out to, to members.
[00:22:39] Speaker A: So, Rob, we've been talking a lot about employee benefits, self insured health plans, but part of my podcast is really about entrepreneurship. It's really about leadership.
And I speak often about having great passion, having great purpose, really having a life filled with joy and happiness and a life where you're making a positive impact.
Can you tell me a little bit about your firm and from your perspective, like what separates you when you think of like leadership and culture?
[00:23:16] Speaker B: Yeah, that's, that's a great question. So I think, I guess a good example.
Somebody asked me this question yesterday and it was a good question. It was just basically, you know, why, as a broker, a consultant, advisor, whatever you want to call us, why, why don't you ever hit the easy button and just take A plan and put it with a BUCA and just call it a day.
And thought to myself, okay, I mean, yeah, you could. But.
So I personally, we don't believe that myself in our agency, we don't believe that I have to feel like I can go to sleep at night and feel like I've done everything I can possibly do to help that client achieve whatever goal that we set for them. If I don't do that, if I hit the snooze button, I'm not helping anybody. And it's not just about. It's kind of the culture of our firm. We don't believe in taking the easy route. We don't believe in hitting the easy button.
It doesn't matter what size group it is.
We will go through the process and we'll teach you everything you want to know. If you don't want to know, that's fine, too. But we will go through every single piece and turn it over just like we would for anybody else.
And so for us, it's just doing that. And, you know, and with our staff and just basically showing our staff, I think it's important to show them that, hey, I will never ask you to do something that I wouldn't do. I will gladly lead by example. I'm a big believer in leading by example. So if I need, I will show up. I will do everything that. Anything and everything that I ever ask you to do, I will do it. I'll do it first and show you I love it.
[00:24:58] Speaker A: Because what I'm hearing you say is, like, there's no options. There's no excuses.
[00:25:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:02] Speaker A: No, we're going to get it done.
Do it the right way for you.
[00:25:06] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's talking about earlier with problem solving. We're big believers, and that's all we're doing. We're solving a healthcare problem.
This company, whether they realize it or not, they have a healthcare problem.
Everybody has a healthcare problem. So we're trying to help you solve that problem.
And there's really no excuse to not attempt and try as hard as you possibly can to do it. And, sure, we fail. We don't.
You know, we don't hit a home run on every single case, but we can at least know that we're trying everything and anything and everything to achieve success for our clients, but also for our team internally.
[00:25:47] Speaker A: So, Rod, today's been awesome. GDK is, you know, it's been around a long time based on the story you shared with us, and has had a ton of success in the past. You're obviously doing a lot of really great things currently, but everything that I've learned and everything I've seen, I think GDK's future is, like, super, super, super bright and positive. And it's been a real pleasure to be here with you today.
[00:26:10] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me, Matt. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
[00:26:15] Speaker A: This is Matthew Naylor. You've been listening to Alignment.
