Winter Spring 2018

16 » A magazine for and about Oregon Community Hospitals. Patrick Allen was appointed Director of the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) by Governor Kate Brown at the end of 2017. Mr. Allen’s guiding principles and his charge fromGovernor Brown are to promote transparency, accountability, and the wise use of public dollars throughout OHA’s many programs. He is committed to accelerating Oregon’s nationally recognized health reforms through its innovative coordinated care system, modernizing public health and strengthening the management and oversight of Oregon’s Medicaid program. Mr. Allen has 25 years in public service, most recently as the director of the Department of Consumer and Business Services (DCBS) for six years. At DCBS he oversaw the regulation of the commercial insurance market, worker safety and health, the financial services industry, building codes, and other services. Currently, Mr. Allen is overseeing the transition of FamilyCare patients to other Medicaid providers and services, managing the agency’s 4,000 employees and a biennial Medicaid budget of $13 billion. With hospitals’ deep interest in the priorities of the OHA, we askedMr. Allen ten questions surrounding the future of the agency and his priorities in his new position. 1. What are your priorities as the new director of Oregon Health Authority? When I took on my role at the Oregon Health Authority, Governor Brown gave me the charge to promote transparency, accountability and the wise use of public resources throughout the agency’s programs. She also gave me a clear direction to advance her priorities for health care: Build on our 95 percent rate of health coverage. Improve health outcomes for Oregonians. Continue OHA’s success in holding down costs in our health care system. Improve Oregonians’ access to behavioral health services, no matter where people live in the state. OHA is a vast agency, with a budget that’s larger than the entire GDP of some nations—but the principles and priorities the Governor gave me when I started are still the ones my team and I focus on each day. 2. What are you hoping to change? It’s clear we have a lot of trust to repair with our partners. The first step to rebuilding trust is to be more transparent about our decisions and our operations, our successes and our problems. We’ve been doing that by bringing in independent experts to review our rate-setting process for coordinated care organizations (CCOs), putting public records requests on our web site and producing regular reports about fixing Medicaid payment issues. The next step is to be more inclusive in our decision-making. We also need to improve our “business rigor.” I look at OHA as something like a start-up company. What I mean is we’re a very young agency by state standards and we launched with big ambitions. Through our Medicaid waiver we’ve had some transformational successes. Yet, we’ve also experienced crises we couldn’t control (like adding 400,000 members to the Oregon Health Plan through the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion), and ones we created (like Cover Oregon). We haven’t had the time or the capacity to build all the systems and consistent operational practices we need because we keep moving from brushfire to brushfire. I’m looking forward to putting out the fires and making life more organized, predictable, and boring for our partners and our employees. 3. How did your experience at the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services prepare you for this role? I call DCBS the biggest agency no one has ever heard of because it contains many functions people know—like regulating worker safety or the commercial insurance market—but the agency itself doesn’t have the same familiarity in the minds of the public. But one thing I learned at DCBS is how important it is to work with all the stakeholders those diverse programs serve, especially in health care. OHA is ten times larger than DCBS and it has an even wider variety of programs. But all its programs contribute to a common mission to advance the health of Oregonians. 10 QUESTIONS: Addressing Challenges Head-on with Oregon Health Authority’s New Director, Patrick Allen