The Business of Healthcare Podcast · Center for Healthcare Leadership and Management

Creating Pockets of Excellence in the Healthcare Industry

·43 min·2 clips

Charlie Munger says healthcare's incentives are wrong, and WW Mayo moved doctors to salary for that reason.

1. The Business of Healthcare Podcast episode is about Eric Bricker's path from NIH lab work to healthcare finance, navigation, and A Healthcare Z. 2. Dr. Bob Kaiser hosts the conversation as Director of the Master's Program in Healthcare Leadership and Management at the University of Texas at Dallas, and Eric Bricker appears as the founder of A Healthcare Z. 3. The episode asks how healthcare money flows, why incentives shape behavior, and why creating a "little pocket of excellence" can matter. 4. Bricker says he grew up near Bethesda, Maryland, where the National Institutes of Health was nearby and a church scientist offered him a $9-an-hour summer internship. 5. He worked in the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases lab for three summers, but he says the work felt isolating and pushed him toward patient-facing care. 6. An emergency-room volunteer role in suburban Washington, D.C. led him to wheel patients, carry samples, and watch sutures, which convinced him to apply to medicine. 7. He says the emergency-room doctors warned him not to become a physician because the 1990s were defined by Hillarycare, HMOs, insurance pressure, and government involvement. 8. Bricker majored in economics, applied to the Peace Corps, and was assigned to Eritrea before deciding not to go because the country was still in conflict. 9. Instead, he took a hospital finance consulting job after college and worked with major medical centers such as Kansas University Medical Center and Cleveland Clinic on billing and coding. 10. He later attended the University of Illinois for medical school and Johns Hopkins for internal medicine residency, where he expected to become a policy-focused physician. 11. Bricker says that path felt too slow, so he teamed with a former consulting colleague to start Compass Professional Health Services with a third partner in 2007. 12. He describes Compass as a navigation business for employers, brokers, and benefits consultants that helped workers use health insurance, dental, vision, and later consumer-directed plans. 13. Compass bootstrapped through the financial crisis, sold to Alight Solutions in 2018, and expanded through large clients including Chili's, Maggiano's Restaurants, T-Mobile, McDonald's, Texas Instruments, NFL teams, and Major League Baseball teams. 14. Bricker says A Healthcare Z began in December 2018 because he wanted one resource that explained how the financing of U.S. healthcare works. 15. He says the channel grew to more than 400 videos, 40,000 LinkedIn followers, and about 20,000 YouTube subscribers. 16. Bricker says the educational gap is real because hospitals, physician practices, and insurers rarely provide formal training in healthcare financing or incentives. 17. He argues that fee-for-service pays for doing things rather than outcomes, and he uses WW Mayo's choice to put Mayo Clinic doctors on salary as a response to that problem. 18. Bricker says hidden money flows create a taboo around healthcare finance, and he repeats the line that "margin in mystery" helps people earn more when others do not understand the cash flow. 19. The tone is conversational, analytic, and example-driven, with Bob Kaiser steering the discussion through business history, policy, and education. 20. People working in healthcare administration, physician leadership, or benefits design would likely get the most from this conversation, while listeners wanting light entertainment would probably skip it.

As heard by us

A steady case for how incentives shape care.

This episode offers a plainspoken look at a long-running healthcare problem: payment structures that reward volume even when they can work against patient interest. Dr. Eric Bricker and Dr.

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Why you'd press play

You need healthcare incentives translated into something you can actually use.

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