Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us at the 41st Annual JPMorgan Healthcare Conference. We're thrilled to have you here. We're also thrilled to have Clover Health and CEO Andrew Toy. I'll pass it over to Andrew for his presentation.
All right. Thank you for joining us all today. I am Andrew Toy. I am the CEO of Clover Health, and I'm delighted to take you through, like, our story, our vision, and what makes us different today. We will have some time at the end for questions if any of you have it or if any of you are watching online have it as well. Standard public company disclaimer, please refer to our disclaimer here for the forward-looking statements that we may make during this presentation. Let's start off with what's the vision of Clover Health, ultimately? I'll go through our business, our business lines, our technology platform, but what are we thinking about in terms of how can we deliver better care at the end of the day? I think this summarizes how we think about it.
We're empowering Medicare physicians to identify and manage chronic diseases earlier, identify them earlier, manage them earlier, and key, empowering physicians at the end of the day. We are a health insurance company. I'll talk about that. We have non-insurance businesses as well, but we're known to be a payer, a healthcare payer. We are absolutely obsessed, absolutely focused on empowering physicians. I don't think every payer might necessarily say that. Payers might acquire physicians, that's not quite the same thing as empowering them. We're all about empowering them to identify and manage diseases earlier, and we build our technology platform, Clover Assistant, in order to make that happen. More to come on that. A little bit about what differentiates us, right? I call it like under our strategy. Number one, we are exclusively focused on Medicare, right? Medicare is what we do.
I'll talk about in a second that we are on both Medicare Advantage and in original Medicare via our ACO. We are focused on Medicare. We don't do the ACA, we don't do commercial. Medicare is what we do. Second of all, we're focused on wide physician networks. I think that's critical to understand what Clover is. We don't have enough doctors in the country as it is. We want to serve everyone. That's our mission. We also think that's a great total addressable market when you can say you can serve everyone. To do that, we need a wide physician network. We cannot just simply select down to physicians that we happen to already like into a narrow network. I'm not deriding narrow network models.
I think they have their place, but how do you serve everybody unless you go onto and use every physician that you possibly can? You'll see that this underlies our business strategy throughout. We are focused on the PPO segment, right? The PPO segment of Medicare Advantage. We are focused on original Medicare, which is the widest Medicare network there is, via our ACO. We are about making physicians better at value-based care, making them better at treating and identifying those conditions earlier. The last I mentioned, once again, we are focused on our technology empowering physicians so that we give out Clover Assistant to make those clinicians better at primary care. Not to say that they're bad at primary care, right?
What we're saying, we can make them better, because at the end of the day, we have so many therapeutics coming out, so many conditions, so many, like, different protocols that no human being, now, almost certainly, and certainly in the future, can keep all of this in their heads at once. How do we put the right information and data across this massive ecosystem at the fingertips of clinicians and physicians, right? That they can render the right empowering care so that they can do their job. I like to say that our user interface to our members, to our patients, is the physician, right?
The application, the cloud, all of that is powered at the back end, putting all of that compute, all of that data, and then putting it as easily as possible into a human physician's mind so that they can work, do what they do best, practice medicine, use their clinical judgment, help their patients. Between these three things, I think that Clover is unique in our approach, right? That's why I wanna emphasize that this is our overall strategy throughout all of our business lines. Our team is a very diverse team. We brought together payers, we brought together people from a payer background, people from provider backgrounds, pure technologists, right? I like to say a little bit we're like the United Nations of healthcare.
We bring together all of these backgrounds because we all know, and you're all at a healthcare conference, that outside of healthcare, everyone says, "Oh, yeah, you're a healthcare person," right? I'm sure you've heard that from your friends. You're like, "Oh, you're a healthcare person." Healthcare payer people are not necessarily exactly the same as healthcare health system people, right? It's heavily divided up into these camps. We're all trying to do similar things, but we're all, at the end of the day, have different motivations, different incentives, and by bringing together all of this expertise, we feel like Clover is in a good place to say, "What are we really trying to do that's good for society?
What are we really trying to do that will really create efficiencies, better outcomes for patients, better, more efficient processes for physicians, leveraging technology to put all of these new capabilities into a physician's hands? You need input from a lot of different people. We've assembled an amazing team to do that. Most of you probably know that Medicare is growing, I'm not gonna spend too much time here. The key part of it that I would take away is that the Medicare market is growing. Medicare Advantage is absolutely taking share, and growing as well within the Medicare market. The fastest growing part of Medicare Advantage itself is that PPO-wide network model. Why is that? Well, we think that people just want choice. That's just the way consumers are set up, certainly in the United States.
People want choice. I'm not gonna do a poll, sometimes I do a poll where I say, "For your own health insurance," people in the room, people watching, when you pick your health insurance, no matter how much you know about health insurance, a lot, a little, do you pick the HMO or do you pick the PPO? I've had people say, "Well, I pick the PPO." I say, "Why? Why do you pick the PPO?" They just say, "Well, it's better." "Why is it better?" They're like, "Well, I don't really know.
I just think that, like, you know, I don't have to think about it as much if I pick the PPO. That's right, you don't have to think about it as much because you know that you will probably be able to go to see a doctor that you wanna go see, and that is important to people, very important to people. It's important to people who choose original Medicare. It's the main reason they pick original Medicare. Original Medicare has its place. Medicare Advantage has its place. Our view is that there's a lot of concentration of people within Medicare Advantage, within those HMOs, and bringing choice and amazing benefits to the PPO, we think we really brought that to the market a few years ago. A lot of people are doing it now. It's a great thing for choice. It's a great thing for Medicare beneficiaries.
Oh, one thing it isn't at the end of the day is efficient. This line grows a lot faster, right? The slope of this line is a lot faster than the slope of the line over there. What's really happening is we're spending too much money per beneficiary, and it's unsustainable. I should also say that as well. People probably do know that. It's, once again, the real flip side of having amazing therapeutics that come to market is that you've got to pay for amazing therapeutics that come to market. Well, how are we going to do that? It's a natural effect. We've got to make healthcare more efficient, so we can still get the benefit of all these new capabilities that are coming while being economically sustainable. That's the game.
Our framework to serve all Medicare beneficiaries, we divided ourselves, and we think about this in terms of three different effective divisions within Clover. We're best known for our Medicare Advantage plans right there on the left. These are our MA plans focused on the PPO, like I talked about. We have HMOs, but we're really, like, known for our flagship PPO plans. A couple years ago, we launched our ACO. Our ACO is to help physicians in original Medicare move their original Medicare panels to value-based care, again, help try and bring sustainability to the program. In the middle there, which we'll be more and more about this now, is that we do have a home care practice that we're very proud of inside Clover as well. This is for our most needy members.
How do we look after them in the best place to give them care, which is in the home? It's not quite home health, it's not quite hospital at home. I know all these terms have floated around, we don't look at it in those dimensions. It's more about when you are sick, you really can't go to the doctor, the doctor should come to you. That could be a fit MD, it could be an NP, it could be an RN, like, you should be receiving care in the home. It could be post-acute, it could be heavy comorbid chronic disease. It's just about, we all kind of know it, sometimes people should be looked after in the home. Big focus of ours. Our home care practice provides a lot of services to our other lines of business.
Ultimately, all of this is powered by this box there on the bottom, Clover Assistant. We'll talk much more about Clover Assistant in a second. It's data and insights to help those physicians identify and manage disease earlier. If you can do that, we bring better sustainability, we get better outcomes. All of these things happen with that identification and that management. Let's go through each of those. I won't walk through every single bullet point, we have these three areas of our business. For Medicare Advantage, we're PPO-centric. I called that out earlier. We're very proud of that. We are designed for growth.
We've recently talked about how-- I've talked about that we are known for our growth because PPO is so popular, and PPO was not really available with good benefits for many years, that when we brought that to market, that people really flocked towards those plans. We see that as an aspect of health equity, right? Making great healthcare affordable while also having choice. Really, really proud of that. While we are designed for that growth, and that fundamentally is our differentiator, we are actually absolutely focused on profitability right now.
I'll talk about that, nearer the end, but our goal is profitability, so we are still growing revenue, but we are backing off the absolute growth view and saying, "How do we create, make sure that we create sustainable margins, create sustainable economics, so we can be around to make sure we can help as many people as possible?" I wouldn't say we're growth off, but we're certainly not as heavily growth on as we were a few years ago. The fundamental differentiator of us being structurally equipped for growth and having a product that people love remains. We're not middlemen. This is something which people don't talk about very much. It was kinda, like, jumped out at me early on, when we looked at this. There are, there is a pathway to success in Medicare Advantage.
It's a good pathway, it's very economically sustainable, where you just heavily delegate all of your risk, right? You go to your providers and you say, "I'm gonna actually give you delegated premiums. I'm gonna give you a percent of premiums," and actually just hand off all the risk to provider groups, and then you don't do anything anymore, really. Right? You step out of the way, and you're like, "You take care of it. You do care management, you pay." You might even pay. Good providers may even pay claims. This is a very successful model. It exists very heavily in, say, Southern Florida. It exists very heavily in Southern California. Seems a little inefficient, though, at the end of the day, because there is still margin flowing towards a plan in that case. It's very unclear what the plan is really doing, right? In what way are you part of the care continuum?
We don't intend to do that, right? I'm not saying that we'll never do delegated risk. I'm not saying that that's a fundamentally bad thing. What I am saying is there is a role for the health plan in being part of that care continuum, helping deliver better outcomes, and it shouldn't just be a pure delegation model. We don't intend forever to go to just being pure middlemen. That's inefficient for society as a whole. I kind of put this in here 'cause I like it. Software-powered. We are at heart-- If people know my background, I am a technologist. I like technology as an accelerant to change. We are software-powered. We are services light. We are very centric on Clover Assistant to help physicians deliver the outcomes that they need to.
We're focused on our MCR, like you can in our last couple earnings, we've talked about how MCR is heading in a good direction. We feel good about that. We are thinking about thoughtful, sustainable revenue growth, so we can keep getting the benefit of that being designed for growth while still moving towards profitability as a priority and significant optimizations that we're looking across the board to SG&A to make sure that we are in an efficient operational harness, right? When you're indexed on growth, sometimes you don't do as much of these things. We're doing those things now. For those of you interested in the financial profile, we did issue a press release with some additional guidance for this year that I won't talk about here, but you can look at our press release from yesterday morning.
Our ACO, let's talk about that. Like I said, this is not Medicare Advantage, to be clear, but it's still Medicare, and this is targeting the people for whom they want to be on original Medicare. They like that massive wide network of people who accept original Medicare. Maybe they have MedSup, Medigap, maybe they don't, but they're on original Medicare. Different kind of business. It's an ACO, very oriented towards physicians, very oriented towards how do you help those physicians get an on-ramp to value-based care. Historically grew really quickly.
There's a lot of appetite in the market for physicians who want to move to value-based care but are not getting the data, not getting the tooling that they need to move towards it quickly, and we wanna be a big part of helping them move towards value-based care with our experiences from being an MA payer, with our experience and our technology set for Clover Assistant. That's that second data point. Technology at scale. Our partnership model relies on not services, but arming physicians with data and using Clover Assistant just like we do in MA to identify diseases earlier and manage them earlier. Fundamentally, it's all just about making that happen. We wanna be that on-ramp to value-based care. Call it a value-based catalyst over here.
We're very excited by this because it's not often that you see a single company saying, "How do you do Medicare Advantage? How do you do Original Medicare simultaneously?" Our technology platform, having a unifying theme between the two and being focused on always on PCPs and physicians. That's common, right? That's common to all of Medicare. That lets us participate in a very large TAM. I've talked about our home care practice, but let's talk a little bit more about here. I'm very excited to be delivering home-based primary care, right? This is literally primary care being delivered in that home. It is not just for palliative and hospice. Don't think about it that way, that we do have capabilities in that area.
We really think about this from a mission perspective as saying, sometimes the appropriate site of care is just the home, right? People cannot leave their home to go to their doctor. Very few doctors make house calls now. We do make house calls. You can think about it that way if you want to. Very, very proud about that. It's not just a readmission prevention program, but we do do readmission prevention. It's very difficult in post-acute and post-discharge, and many of you know this, to help manage that care. PCPs really struggle to manage that care as well to be able to get in there. Even if you have a very engaged PCP, again, they can't make house calls.
They can't do wound care. They can't-- They're not looking and doing that MedRec when you get discharged with medications from the from being inpatient. There's a lot of things we can do in this area that just make care better. We have a really good positive member experience. Our NPS is really solid. I love seeing that. People who get this home care really like it. You know, we love the care that we're rendering. We like to look after people. The patients love it as well. I think that's a really critical aspect of it. Again, once again, uses Clover Assistant. Clover Assistant ties together all aspects of our care continuum, and our own home care practice is no different.
Embedded and incubated within our plan, we see this as a general capability, which is really interesting. Just the area of home care is something that really is strategically, I think that healthcare will be moving towards in the next few years.
Let's talk about Clover Assistant now. Let's talk about exactly what it is and how it helps. It's pretty nuanced, but at the top here, it's a cloud-based software platform. It's normally used as a web application. It can be used on an iPad or a mobile device. It's most commonly used within a browser. It's-- That is just the front end to a whole data platform, which is collecting information and signals in our role as a payer from across the healthcare ecosystem, cleaning it, looking at it, and most importantly, and this is the thing I'll talk about today, what are driving capabilities and driving insights to the actual physician? We measure Clover Assistant on its ability to change the pathway of care, and I'll talk about that in a second.
Yes, it's about data. Yes, it's about insights. Yes, we have machine learning, and we have an expert system. It's all about how we actually present this information that lets a very wide diverse set of PCPs look at it and say, "Yes, that's helpful. Yes, I might do something different based upon what you've just shown to me." Interoperability. Really excited about interoperability, right, as a technologist.
It's been happening for a while. If you think about interoperability, a lot of regulations came online. They kind of came online during the pandemic, which is unfortunate, but, you know, like got delayed a little bit, but are actually landing now, where the government, CMS and the government are saying, "You kind of have to do interoperability." It's like a next-generational version of Meaningful Use, right? Where we're saying, "You have to now share your data, not just have it within an electronic format." I don't know if people are from providers here or maybe HCIT people. Most people see this as a burden. Like, "Oh, okay, I have to be compliant, I have to do interoperability." Right?
I think the reason that the fact that people think of this as a burden is really interesting to me because that means that people kind of have no ideas on how to use this data. They're just like, "Oh, okay, we have to do it. Fine, we'll do it." We should have amazing ideas on what we're going to do with this data. At Clover, we do have amazing ideas, I think, of what we're gonna do with this data, because we already see that the richer the data is, the more the better fidelity we have, the more the more granular, the more real-time it is, directly flows into making it more useful to primary care physicians. We just know that. We see it already.
We're incredibly excited by this new next wave of interoperability that we're gonna see over the next year or two, because it will turbocharge not only new Clover Assistant features, but the features that we already have, right? Like, models that we already have will get better. It will let us train new models. It will let us do new kind of feature sets. All of these things are gonna be turbocharged by data, and that data is coming online via interoperability. Look for more there, but really excited by the progress in the next few years that we're gonna see. Across the industry, but definitely for Clover Assistant. It's a physician-centric design. I talked a couple of years ago that we didn't yet have EHR integrations, but we were gonna do them.
We have since done them. We've integrated to the major EHRs. We're proud of that. At the end of the day, we're not building Clover Assistant to replace an EHR. It is not an EHR. It is us trying to say, "How do we help you?" It's called Assistant for a reason. How do we help physicians make better decisions using their clinical judgment? That's not really the job of the EHR. The EHR is like a documentation tool. Yes, there's features that are coming in to try and do a little more than that. We are trying to be a general layer across many, many different kinds of workflow in an EHR that lets physicians just be better at their jobs. Ultimately, we provide a fulsome longitudinal picture of what's going on with a given patient.
We do that by giving snippets of insights to PCPs when they're thinking about that patient and thinking about care. And when we do that, we believe that we're seeing good signals that care is actually getting better. Gonna talk about that more in a second. It's widely deployed. I have a little bit of a map here. You know, we have the ACO business, and we have the MA business, and so those don't directly overlap with each other. You can see that we have good geographic coverage in a number of states, and we can do more and more here. A number of physicians already using it. There are videos here that we put online with physician testimonials if anybody wants to see them. These are some quotes from those physician testimonials.
The key is that we have a lot of our membership covered right now, and they are already going to see Clover Assistant physicians. We're proud about that. We want even more people to be going to see Clover Assistant physicians because we truly believe data-powered care is better care. Really excited by this next part. Clover Assistant changes the timeline of care. It's not about how much data you have. It's not about like machine learning models and all those kinds of buzzwords. It's about how do we make those things useful to an actual practicing clinician, and how do we make it useful to the widest set of clinicians possible, right? That's what the ultimate goal is here. All technology is a means to an end.
Let's talk about this first example. Clover Assistant helps in the early treatment of diabetes. Here, the set that we're looking at is the set of people for whom we have no record of diabetes, right? There's no record in our datasets. We have a lot of datasets, but we don't see a diagnosis for diabetes. We don't see any diabetes medications, really. That's on this left-hand side here. Not really any diabetes medication use in this set of folks. They go into their PCP, and our risk algorithm identifies that this person may be diabetic, right? That's a whole set of, you know, that's from the Clover System data platform.
That's surfaced to the PCP and says, "Hey, have you considered diabetes here?" Remember, there's no meds here, there's no other signals, no previous diagnosis. It's just saying, "Have you thought about diabetes here?" They don't have a diagnosis here. We see that a good number of times, not every time, that would be magic, but a good number of times, the physician is saying, "Yes, you know what? I've not really thought about that before, but I do believe this patient is diabetic." They put in that first-time diagnosis of diabetes, and that, and that's for day zero, which is this large spike here. This large spike is not diagnoses. This large spike is diabetic medication fills occurring contemporaneously with the Clover Assistant visit.
That PCP in one go, when a Clover Assistant visit is happening, is for the first time saying, "Hmm, there's no previous diabetes diagnosis, but I do think, using my own clinical judgment, that there is diabetes present." They're doing, they're finding that disease earlier, and then they're prescribing, and we are seeing medication fills same day, that's a spike, and then following as well, it's not all happening the same day, of those diabetes medications. We have pretty high conviction here that when we talk about that diabetes diagnosis and that treatment was an emergent property of the use of the Clover Assistant on that particular day. That's a really cool thing that we're seeing, right? That actually a physician, in conjunction with them, using the tool, the timeline of care has changed. We identified it earlier. We started managing it earlier.
You'll notice I didn't talk about economics here. I didn't say, "And then the MLR went down the next day." That's not gonna happen. In fact, the MLR probably goes up because we're paying for medications right away. We're just saying as Clover, yeah, I'm sure at, you know, a couple years down the line, I'll have actuarial studies and all those things to say, like, "Yeah, all of this tied together." We all know it takes time. Just as long as you say you identify it earlier and you manage it earlier for chronic disease, we have so many great therapeutics, and not all of them are expensive, that that is in its of itself a good that we're doing. That is a powerful aspect of Clover Assistant. Here's a second example, and this is chronic kidney disease, CKD. Right?
A little, a very interesting one. The, the graph is changing here to the cohort of physicians before they adopted Clover Assistant compared to after adopting Clover Assistant. The other one was about people sort of like identifying disease. This one is about what happens before and then after and doing a little bit of a comparison. The Y-axis here is the GFR, which is a rough approximation of kidney function. Higher is better. Higher is better kidney function. What you're seeing here is that at the point where diagnosis occurs, and we use CKD Stage 3 as a useful marker, 'cause that's generally when CKD 3 is found and when it becomes symptomatic as well.
That the same set of doctors are generally finding and diagnosing and identifying CKD 3, while the kidney has higher function remaining when they use Clover Assistant, right? When we say find things earlier, we don't necessarily mean by age. We mean by disease progression, right? The disease has progressed less, but we're finding it sooner in its progression, and we are managing it sooner as progression because it has more kidney function. Even though, to be clear, it's not perfect kidney function, but if you had perfect kidney function, you don't have CKD. Obviously that's not gonna go together. But we are finding it earlier, and that set of clinicians is finding it earlier when that happens, right? You can start managing it, which I showed you in the previous slide.
We want to index everyone on if you really believe that's true, that finding these and identifying these diseases earlier and then managing them earlier in the chronic stage is a good, we're really excited, hopefully you're excited about what we can do with Clover Assistant as well.
All right. Let's talk a little bit further on our 2023 focus, and I'll wrap up, and then we can take some questions. Our goal in 2023 is absolutely on shareholder value. Because, you know, we believe at Clover Health that shareholder value lines up really well with societal value, which lines up really well with patient value, which lines up really well with physician value. Fortunately, our focus on shareholder value means benefits to all of those constituents as well, right? We're a public company. We wrap that all up in shareholder value.
Number one, we are prioritizing profitability. Absolutely, right? We are looking at moving towards profitability. We are making sure that we don't look at growth at the expense of profitability. We're aligned towards that, and that is what we want to move towards. Being sustainable in our model allows us to go forward and help as many people as possible. Sustainability and profitability will fund the mission. Second of all, we are pricing our insurance plans. We already did this recently for profitability and the ability to generate margins. Typically, they were priced very much aggressively for growth. We changed that. We're still very strong plans, but we're not out there just completely priced for growth. We are priced now to make sure we generate those sustainable margins as well.
Similarly, within our non-insurance line of business, we are aiming to generate gross profit sooner rather than later so that it has contribution to the overall company. SG&A, I talked about that before. When you're focused on growth, sometimes you're not sort of tuning and optimizing. We're not a very old company. We've been around like 10+ years. There's a lot of places we can tune from all the businesses we've launched and optimizing the core of the business. We wanna tune SG&A to make sure that's in the right place for overhead 'cause every dollar we save on SG&A is dollars that can go towards care.
We are managing our capital prudently. We are by definition not profitable yet, otherwise I wouldn't need point number one, but we are very prudently managing our capital to make sure we look at our burn rate, reducing that burn rate quarter-over-quarter, and making sure that we move towards creating that positive EBITDA so that we can use our cash. Fortunately, we've always talked multiple times about being in a strong liquidity position, and we intend to keep on looking at that, making sure that as we move to profitability, that we become a profitable, sustainable company. Feel really good about our technology, feel really good about our differentiation, feel really good that we're designed for growth. This is our focus now as the last piece of the puzzle to show that we're sustainable.
That creates immense shareholder value and creates value up into the future for our mission as well to help and improve every life. Well, thank you, everybody. I'm happy to take some questions if there are any.
Yes. Thank you very much, Andrew. If you've got a question, please raise your hand. We'll come to you with the microphone, and we ask that you speak the question into the microphone for everyone to hear. I think maybe to start off, we could talk about the outlook for 2023 in terms of the guidance you've provided and how you see profitability emerging maybe in certain markets where it's been heading in that direction. The direction you expect it to go.
Yeah. Let's talk about profitability. We issued like, some additional guidance yesterday morning. If you look at that, I would paraphrase it as saying that we expect MCR, which is our care ratios, and relative gross margins to improve in our markets. They've been improving for a while. They will continue to improve, we expect. We also talked about how we expect revenues to be growing like year-over-year, and we feel good about that we are not just absolutely focused on growth. We are focused on sustainable-profitable growth. We emphasize that we actually had negative gross margin above 100% MCRs in the non-insurance business. We have tuned that business.
We talked about that last year, where we really think that by focusing on a narrower set of providers, working with them a little bit earlier, a little bit tighter, we can be more efficient and also deliver profitability in that line of business sooner rather than later. There's nothing as in any area that's like, you know, a silver bullet, but just the focus there, where the focus previously was on growth, we feel very good about in terms of our motion towards profitability.
Excellent. perhaps, another question around, your ACO business and, moving that to a model where you're seeing more upside rather than upside and downside.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah. Let's talk about that. There's enormous appetite right now in providers to actually move to value-based care. If you talk to any provider, they're not gonna be like, "Oh, no, fee for service forever." People wanna move towards value-based care. What we're seeing though is it's like, what does that progression really look like at wide scale? There's a number of health systems and providers who are already good, you know, fantastic. They can always be better, they're already good. There's a big set of folks who are kinda sitting on the fence. I think that we discovered that our model, technology-centric services, like, resonates really well as an on-ramp to value-based care for these folks who are sitting on the fence right now. That's why we saw such massive growth in our ACO business early on.
What we're seeing now as well is that there's a different level of sophistication and progression for each of these health systems, and some of them are ready right away to move very quickly. Some of them will take more time, and that's just because they're different institutions, and not all of them are ready for upside/downside risk straight away, right? What we're thinking is it makes sense to have a blended portfolio of offerings whereby we can start people off, you know, a bit more of a toe in the water, ankle in the water with value-based care in more upside-only programs, then work with them, work with them with our data tools, make sure that they're looking good, making sure that they feel comfortable, then moving them and progressing them, graduating them, if you will, into upside-downside programs as well a little further along.
I think that will be a better combination and a little bit more nuanced than our previous strategy, which started everybody with an upside-downside risk and kind of like, you know, pushed them into the pool right away. A more progressive, gradual version, I think, will actually result in sustainable growth and sustainable profitability in that line of business.
Yes, please. Can we get the microphone up here? Sorry, just a moment.
Sorry. Wait. Yeah, I'll repeat it if you wanna.
Oh, sorry. Right here.
We'll do it. Otherwise, I can always repeat the question.
Sure.
Hi.
Hi. A question on Clover Assistant.
Sure.
How do you find the adoption by the physicians of there? Is there an embracing of it, or is there some questioning initially in terms of affecting professional judgment, et cetera, et cetera?
Yeah, absolutely. Am I detecting an Australian accent? Yeah. I'm also Australian, which is why, by the way, I'm a dual citizen. Australia also has a program called Medicare, which causes enormous amounts of problems when I go back to Australia because I'm like, "I work in Medicare." They're like, "You do?" I'm like, "Oh, no, not this Medicare." Adoption of Clover Assistant. Yeah, a lot of clinicians, I think, like the tool because when it moves them towards that value-based care, it is, I honestly believe, obviously, I was involved in its development, an on-ramp, right? We don't wanna push them right into the pool. We don't wanna twist their arm. Clinicians want to feel like they are practicing medicine. That's why they went to medical school.
They wanna feel like they can use their clinical judgment, which Clover Assistant lets them do. We never say, "Oh, you know, you have to agree with us, and that way we'll pay you more." Like, "If you disagree with us and don't do these things, we'll pay you less." A lot of value-based programs kind of do those kinds of take those approaches. I'm not against them, that's not our approach. We want our clinicians to be able to practice medicine at the end of the day. I think the key thing is when you looked at those results that I showed earlier, none of those are driven by us saying, "We want you to focus on diabetes," and that's something we want you to focus on. We're not like, "You wanna focus on CKD. We want you to look at that."
We are actually launching these features into Clover Assistant in a dynamic way. There's no retraining of physicians when they do it. They learn how to use Clover Assistant once. The example I like to give is, if you learn to use GPS, generally, you don't learn to use GPS in San Francisco, then learn to use GPS in Chicago, then learn to use GPS in Paris. You learn how to use GPS generally, then no matter where you are, it can show you traffic, dynamic turn-by-turn directions. If you're still in control, but you know how to use it. I think that's the most positive reception we're seeing from the clinicians, is it's not like a series of programs that are being launched out there. It's helping them give care.
We're not always perfect, but it's helping them give care, and it's helping them do it in a way that just doesn't constantly require retraining, new motivations, new programs, like, "It's the end of the year. Now we need you to do this." It's all sort of, like, very dynamic in the flow of care in the same way by turn-by-turn directions are dynamic as well. We learn and we adapt as well. That's what I mean by we're not always perfect is. I'll give an example. We launched a feature to try and say, "Hey, let's identify COPD pulmonary disease earlier, just like we do for diabetes and CKD." We were using as a signal into the model a inhaler medication to do that.
We were seeing that a lot of clinicians would just say, "No, no, this is not COPD. This is not COPD." Even when the model was triggering. We always ask for a piece of feedback on that. They were saying, "Oh, I'm just using this off-label," and I believe it was to manage like an allergy, I think, right? A really powerful thing we have with Clover Assistant is this closed loop. We just looked at that, and we just tune down that model significantly in that particular case. While we didn't get it right the first time, I'm not saying we're perfect right away.
What we can do, because we iterate and launch new features so quickly, is react to that feedback and then say, "Okay, look, we heard your feedback. This inhaler probably isn't COPD. We've adjusted and now, like, you know, we've appropriately tuned down that prediction. Right? I think that earns a lot of credibility with folks as well. Yeah, thank you for the question.
We got time for maybe one or two more.
It's always shy in the room. Please.
Thanks. How does your system detect poor diagnosis or, differentiate, quality of doctors? Let's say for patients who visit, let's say they visit a few to find a good one, how does that inform, I guess isn't inform the patient, but.
Sure.
How do you improve the diagnosis ability of doctors?
Yeah. I think that there's a couple different ways to look at that. Just to be clear, we don't score necessarily doctors and then expose that to patients. I'd like you to know we have a lot of data. We just choose not to do that, right? We believe that the patient-doctor relationship is really a trust relationship. I think that what I think about when is that as long as you trust your doctor, that's the most important thing. Remember what I said, like the doctor is the user experience to the, to the member. If that trust is there, we can help the doctor. If the doctor can't keep everything in their head at once, that is not their fault. They're not a bad doctor because of that.
It's just there's so much data, so much information, so much like sprawl of what's going on, that we don't blame the doctor for that. The number one thing is, as long as that patient likes their doctor, right, trusts their doctor, the job of Clover Assistant is to sort of like, you know, show that to the physician on the side. We're not saying, "Hey, you better make sure your doctor's using Clover Assistant." The Clover Assistant's there to help the doctor so they can look at it quickly and say, "Hey, I should look at these things," and improve that standard of care when they go in there. An example I give, because you're asking about identifying diseases is, maybe for some of those--
I'm making this up, but maybe for those folks who came in for the diabetes example I gave, if that patient came in with migraine, something I like to say is when a patient comes in with migraine, that doctor is going to talk about migraine, right? That patient's only gonna wanna talk about migraine, 'cause if that's what they came in, that's the primary complaint. Maybe they also need to be worked up for diabetes as well. I'm not saying the diabetes caused the migraine. I'm just saying just because they've got this really present symptom, there might be the unsymptomatic diseases lurking underneath that we can then also capture, because the hardest thing is to get that patient in the room with the doctor to do this more generalized workup.
We can use the opportunity to say, "Hey, while you're in there," either ahead of time, they can look at a printout, they can look at Clover Assistant ahead of time, they can use it in the room, but they can say, "I should also just check in on the diabetes, even though I'm gonna work on the migraine as well." As long as they have that trusted relationship, there's gonna be, we think, a good outcome from a care management perspective.
Thank you, Andrew. That's all the time we have for today. If you've got any closing remarks, please go ahead.
Oh, thank you. Well, thank you so much for coming to hear about Clover. Hopefully, this helps explain why we think we're differentiated, why we think that our model is really gonna help people, why it's gonna help society, patients. We wanna help physicians as well. That really results in us being a different kind of payer within healthcare. Thank you very much. I'll be here if you wanna ask me more questions.