theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts Series | Aric Coffman, P3 Health Partners

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Aric Coffman

CEO

P3 Health Partners

play_circle_outline Aric Coffman: surgeon turned CEO focusing on systemic healthcare impact

play_circle_outline Partnering with primary care clinicians to coordinate care outside clinic walls

play_circle_outline Patient stratification and predictive modeling to proactively prevent crises

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Aric Coffman, P3 Health Partners

Aric Coffman

CEO P3 Health Partners

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John Furrier

>> ... Palo Alto Studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here with Dave Vellante, my co-host.

Gemma Allen

>> Welcome back to theCUBE's Studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Gemma Allen with theCUBE. And joining me now for a mixture of experts is Aric Coffman, CEO of P3 Health Partners. Welcome, Aric.

Aric Coffman

>> Thank you so much.

Gemma Allen

>> So Aric, you have an interesting background, 17 years as a surgeon working in theaters, now in the business world.

Aric Coffman

>> Yes.

Gemma Allen

>> Maybe let's just start a little bit with you. Fill us in on what brought you from the world of hospitals to business.

Aric Coffman

>> I recognized that my patients were sick, but the healthcare system was even more sick. And as I looked at the impact I could have during my career, it was clear to me that I would have more impact on a global scale doing business than operating one patient at a time.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. P3 Health Partners, you're with this company two years, CEO. What exact problem is this company looking to solve?

Aric Coffman

>> So we are a population health company that works with primary care clinicians and specifically around senior patients, those patients that have multiple chronic conditions, the frail and the elderly that often fall through the cracks. And we bring tools, resources, and people to the primary care clinicians to get better outcomes.

Gemma Allen

>> When you say the healthcare system is broken-

Aric Coffman

>> Yes....

Gemma Allen

>> break that down. Listen, I'm a European, I'm an Irish woman living in New York.

Aric Coffman

>> Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> I see the health insurance. As a non-American, it's crazy how the system works, as an outsider, but I guess most Americans are somewhat immune to it. It's all they've ever known.

Aric Coffman

>> Right.

Gemma Allen

>> What parts of it do you think are the most broken? Tell me more about that.

Aric Coffman

>> So I think when you look at the incentives that you have in healthcare, it's important to align the incentives to the outcomes that you want. And traditionally in the United States healthcare system, it's based on what's called a fee-for-service model, which means that you get paid for every service that you do, which incents the system to do more in order to make more dollars. And that may not be in the best interest of the patient in order to do that or in the system in general. And so part of what our push is is to move into what we call value-based contracts where we take on full responsibility for the population for their outcomes financially as well as quality.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. Okay. So how does this work in practice? This is direct to consumer. It's an intermediary model. What is the actual business model here? How do the wheels rotate?

Aric Coffman

>> Yeah. So the way I would think about it is we align the payers, the health plans, with the clinicians contractually, and then we align the services that that physician is able to provide out to the patient. So I really see us as a bridge across the health system itself. And so the way that it works is we'll take on a population of patients with the partnership of the primary care clinicians, and then we will help them with services outside the four walls of the clinic and help coordinate that care so that those patients get the things that they need.

Gemma Allen

>> And is this, in terms of that population, that cleavage, is this based on some sort of patterned behavior? What is it that you guys would look for in any one specific opportunity? Is it based on folks that share the same illness or ailments or historical history? What is it exactly?

Aric Coffman

>> So it's really based on the patient's demographic age. So we take care of the senior population predominantly and then we go into geographies where we have density that makes sense. And so today, we have about 106,000 seniors that we're caring for and we partner with over 2,000 primary care providers to bring that care to them. And when you look at that population, you'll see that you can break it down into various segments. And when you segment that population, the top 2% consume a lot of the resources, the middle 50% don't consume much at all. And so what we have to do is stratify the populations to understand where they're having barriers or problems and then proactively, using predictive modeling and other systems, get out to the patients before they have issues. So our whole job is prevention and wellness creation in that population rather than reacting to what the patients have.

Gemma Allen

>> How do large insurers respond to models like this?

Aric Coffman

>> They're very interested in what we provide because we are able to improve the quality of what happens for those patient populations and that dictates how much revenue comes into the pool so they need that help and then we can help them grow. And we have services that they can't do. We provide direct services to patients as well as help facilitate what the clinicians and the community are doing.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. Okay. So we're four and a half minutes in and we haven't talked about AI. I mean, that might be a record for me on this show, but we're probably going to have to go there. But talk to me a little bit about the tech, the discoverability, what you guys are using in terms of understanding these populations, understanding the innovation and even advancements that maybe have been lurking in the shadows and not necessarily realized for some time.

Aric Coffman

>> Yeah. The way I'd classify it for us in the healthcare industry is that we're data rich and information poor. And the way I think about explaining our application of technology is in the business and then outside of the business. And so when I think about internal teams, we're using predictive modeling and AI to help the teams be able to identify which patient populations may have a certain condition or a rising risk patient. And then we're also providing a point of care tool technologically out in the field for the primary care clinicians so they can service those insights and use those insights. And then we have outreach capabilities that we do using AI directly to patient populations, and that's getting more and more interesting as a technology evolves.

Gemma Allen

>> And is that like in the telehealth space? What does the actual UX look like on that?

Aric Coffman

>> Yeah. So for the clinicians at the point of care, it's an overlay into their EMR so that we don't have to use their electronic health record. We can use any electronic health record and get that information to them. In terms of what the patients experience, they experience it more like an analog system. So they're picking up their telephone and they're talking to an agent on the other end. A company that we're using, it's just been phenomenal is called Attune and they have the ability for us to use agents to call patients to do outreach, do manual work that we used to have to do manually, automate that, and then improve the overall outcomes for those patients using that information.

Gemma Allen

>> So I'm trying to imagine a day in your life, I imagine it must have a large partnership ecosystem, a company like yours. How does that work? Is that constantly evolving? Do you guys have kind of long-term bets?

Aric Coffman

>> Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> And how are those worlds of partnerships on your kind of direct company converging in the innovation space?

Aric Coffman

>> Right. So I think in terms of the partnerships that we have, we partner both with the payers, the health plans, as well as with the providers and the communities that they're serving. So there's a couple of different stakeholders that we have. Our primary customer is the primary care physician, because ultimately it's their patients that we're helping with.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. And it's so interesting on the primary care physician side of it, because like I said earlier, in Europe, that one doctor is kind of like you're everything, right?

Aric Coffman

>> Your quarterback.

Gemma Allen

>> That doctor knows more about you than most.

Aric Coffman

>> Right.

Gemma Allen

>> In the US, the system is quite fragmented. Folks see, there's so many specialists for so many different challenges or problems that it can sometimes seem, I'm sure they're quite overwhelming.

Aric Coffman

>> Yeah. And I'll give you some sobering statistics. So in the United States, the profession with the highest suicide rate in the country is physicians, and it's almost 2X the general population. Female physicians can be as much as 400% higher than the general population of women in this country. We're projected to have a PCP shortage, a primary care shortage of up to 40,000 PCPs by 2034, and we have an aging population with more chronic conditions. So we need AI to be able to help us augment what the clinicians are able to do. Most PCPs in our country have about 2,000 to 3,000 patients they're caring for at any one time, and they don't have access to the information that helps them manage that population like they need to. And that's really where technology steps in.

Gemma Allen

>> And that is so, first of all, kind of like harrowing to hear because it's such an important job, but also such a stressful job, I'm sure. And part of that stress is probably based the fact that you feel like you can't help people the way they need to be helped.

Aric Coffman

>> You nailed it.

Gemma Allen

>> Yeah.

Aric Coffman

>> They actually call it a moral injury is the way they define it.

Gemma Allen

>> Oh.

Aric Coffman

>> So when you look at burnout, another stat, there's over a 50% burnout rate for PCPs in this country. And what that means is when you're in there, they don't even have the empathy to be able to engage with you in the way that they need to. And not because they don't want to, but because they're burned out. And so what we're trying to provide are alternative resources so that their stress goes down, their fulfillment goes up and then we are able to sustain careers, and that actually sustains that patient provider relationship longer. It's really, really important.

Gemma Allen

>> When we think about things like access to information, access to data, GDPR, patient records, et cetera, some folks are of the belief that like, yes, the US has a health tech problem or an insurance problem per se. I mean, that's a common challenge, right? But also somewhat of a policy problem and that can kind of vary state by state.

Aric Coffman

>> Yes.

Gemma Allen

>> How does that impact your business? Are there states where you feel like it's easier to land and impact ?

Aric Coffman

>> So part of the reason that we're in the segment that we're in is it's a federal program. So we don't have to deal, like in Medicaid, we don't have to deal with the same state to state variation. We're dealing with a national program. There can still be variances from state to state, but it's not like it is with Medicaid. From a policy perspective, I think data interoperability is something that could be addressed from a policy perspective that would change the way that we consume data and information, and give us more speed to action. And that's really the key is having information timely so that I know when that patient needs us and then we can create an intervention out to the home, maybe see them again in the hospital, whatever that intervention might be. There's too much slowness in what happens in the system today because of the interoperability challenges.

Gemma Allen

>> So we cover a lot of tech shows. We go on the road and we talk to a lot of tech founders and leaders and they all have this big, big bet that AI can solve all sorts of problems in society. I guess a skepticism I sometimes have is, yes, it can solve for Jamie Dimon's problems because got massive budgets, he can spend, spend, spend. There is, in some respects, if the innovation is there and the opportunity is there, those two worlds will always collide kind of naturally, right? In the healthcare space though, we know that a lot of hospitals are running Excel spreadsheets, they're run completely on prem solutions. Some of them never even made it to the cloud.

Aric Coffman

>> Exactly.

Gemma Allen

>> How are they now expected to suddenly avail of this sorcery of AI? What's the reality here? Be frank, bridge that gap a little bit.

Aric Coffman

>> I mean, I think it's going to be clunky and I think there will be winners and losers in all of it at the end of the day, but it has to happen. The system needs a new way of doing business, and I think that AI has a lot of promise. It's not going to be a silver bullet that cures everything because there's too many places that you have to apply those learnings, but I do think that it's something that's going to help get us out of this situation.

Gemma Allen

>> Well, I certainly hope so. So Aric, what's ahead for you and the team? What does the end of this year? We're halfway through. What does the next six months look like and what's on the big roadmap here?

Aric Coffman

>> Yeah. So we're really excited about 2026. It's been a great year for us. We're somewhat of a comeback story in terms of what we've done within the business and the teams have been working really, really hard to get us to a great place. And I think with the technology that we're now implementing in our business, I think that we're on a growth trajectory through the end of '26 and into 2027. And what I'd like us to do is to be able to expand outside of the five states that we're in heading into '27 and '28 to be able to reach more communities and provide more help than we can today.

Gemma Allen

>> Well, I certainly hope you're successful on that mission. I think America needs better healthcare and patients need better outcomes. So Aric, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.

Aric Coffman

>> Thank you so much for having me.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm Gemma Allen here at theCUBE Studio at the New York Stock Exchange. This is Mixture of Experts. Thanks for watching.

Aric Coffman, P3 Health Partners

search

John Furrier

>> ... Palo Alto Studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here with Dave Vellante, my co-host.

Gemma Allen

>> Welcome back to theCUBE's Studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Gemma Allen with theCUBE. And joining me now for a mixture of experts is Aric Coffman, CEO of P3 Health Partners. Welcome, Aric.

Aric Coffman

>> Thank you so much.

Gemma Allen

>> So Aric, you have an interesting background, 17 years as a surgeon working in theaters, now in the business world.

Aric Coffman

>> Yes.

Gemma Allen

>> Maybe let's just start a little bit with you. Fill us in on what brought you from the world of hospitals to business.

Aric Coffman

>> I recognized that my patients were sick, but the healthcare system was even more sick. And as I looked at the impact I could have during my career, it was clear to me that I would have more impact on a global scale doing business than operating one patient at a time.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. P3 Health Partners, you're with this company two years, CEO. What exact problem is this company looking to solve?

Aric Coffman

>> So we are a population health company that works with primary care clinicians and specifically around senior patients, those patients that have multiple chronic conditions, the frail and the elderly that often fall through the cracks. And we bring tools, resources, and people to the primary care clinicians to get better outcomes.

Gemma Allen

>> When you say the healthcare system is broken-

Aric Coffman

>> Yes....

Gemma Allen

>> break that down. Listen, I'm a European, I'm an Irish woman living in New York.

Aric Coffman

>> Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> I see the health insurance. As a non-American, it's crazy how the system works, as an outsider, but I guess most Americans are somewhat immune to it. It's all they've ever known.

Aric Coffman

>> Right.

Gemma Allen

>> What parts of it do you think are the most broken? Tell me more about that.

Aric Coffman

>> So I think when you look at the incentives that you have in healthcare, it's important to align the incentives to the outcomes that you want. And traditionally in the United States healthcare system, it's based on what's called a fee-for-service model, which means that you get paid for every service that you do, which incents the system to do more in order to make more dollars. And that may not be in the best interest of the patient in order to do that or in the system in general. And so part of what our push is is to move into what we call value-based contracts where we take on full responsibility for the population for their outcomes financially as well as quality.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. Okay. So how does this work in practice? This is direct to consumer. It's an intermediary model. What is the actual business model here? How do the wheels rotate?

Aric Coffman

>> Yeah. So the way I would think about it is we align the payers, the health plans, with the clinicians contractually, and then we align the services that that physician is able to provide out to the patient. So I really see us as a bridge across the health system itself. And so the way that it works is we'll take on a population of patients with the partnership of the primary care clinicians, and then we will help them with services outside the four walls of the clinic and help coordinate that care so that those patients get the things that they need.

Gemma Allen

>> And is this, in terms of that population, that cleavage, is this based on some sort of patterned behavior? What is it that you guys would look for in any one specific opportunity? Is it based on folks that share the same illness or ailments or historical history? What is it exactly?

Aric Coffman

>> So it's really based on the patient's demographic age. So we take care of the senior population predominantly and then we go into geographies where we have density that makes sense. And so today, we have about 106,000 seniors that we're caring for and we partner with over 2,000 primary care providers to bring that care to them. And when you look at that population, you'll see that you can break it down into various segments. And when you segment that population, the top 2% consume a lot of the resources, the middle 50% don't consume much at all. And so what we have to do is stratify the populations to understand where they're having barriers or problems and then proactively, using predictive modeling and other systems, get out to the patients before they have issues. So our whole job is prevention and wellness creation in that population rather than reacting to what the patients have.

Gemma Allen

>> How do large insurers respond to models like this?

Aric Coffman

>> They're very interested in what we provide because we are able to improve the quality of what happens for those patient populations and that dictates how much revenue comes into the pool so they need that help and then we can help them grow. And we have services that they can't do. We provide direct services to patients as well as help facilitate what the clinicians and the community are doing.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. Okay. So we're four and a half minutes in and we haven't talked about AI. I mean, that might be a record for me on this show, but we're probably going to have to go there. But talk to me a little bit about the tech, the discoverability, what you guys are using in terms of understanding these populations, understanding the innovation and even advancements that maybe have been lurking in the shadows and not necessarily realized for some time.

Aric Coffman

>> Yeah. The way I'd classify it for us in the healthcare industry is that we're data rich and information poor. And the way I think about explaining our application of technology is in the business and then outside of the business. And so when I think about internal teams, we're using predictive modeling and AI to help the teams be able to identify which patient populations may have a certain condition or a rising risk patient. And then we're also providing a point of care tool technologically out in the field for the primary care clinicians so they can service those insights and use those insights. And then we have outreach capabilities that we do using AI directly to patient populations, and that's getting more and more interesting as a technology evolves.

Gemma Allen

>> And is that like in the telehealth space? What does the actual UX look like on that?

Aric Coffman

>> Yeah. So for the clinicians at the point of care, it's an overlay into their EMR so that we don't have to use their electronic health record. We can use any electronic health record and get that information to them. In terms of what the patients experience, they experience it more like an analog system. So they're picking up their telephone and they're talking to an agent on the other end. A company that we're using, it's just been phenomenal is called Attune and they have the ability for us to use agents to call patients to do outreach, do manual work that we used to have to do manually, automate that, and then improve the overall outcomes for those patients using that information.

Gemma Allen

>> So I'm trying to imagine a day in your life, I imagine it must have a large partnership ecosystem, a company like yours. How does that work? Is that constantly evolving? Do you guys have kind of long-term bets?

Aric Coffman

>> Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> And how are those worlds of partnerships on your kind of direct company converging in the innovation space?

Aric Coffman

>> Right. So I think in terms of the partnerships that we have, we partner both with the payers, the health plans, as well as with the providers and the communities that they're serving. So there's a couple of different stakeholders that we have. Our primary customer is the primary care physician, because ultimately it's their patients that we're helping with.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. And it's so interesting on the primary care physician side of it, because like I said earlier, in Europe, that one doctor is kind of like you're everything, right?

Aric Coffman

>> Your quarterback.

Gemma Allen

>> That doctor knows more about you than most.

Aric Coffman

>> Right.

Gemma Allen

>> In the US, the system is quite fragmented. Folks see, there's so many specialists for so many different challenges or problems that it can sometimes seem, I'm sure they're quite overwhelming.

Aric Coffman

>> Yeah. And I'll give you some sobering statistics. So in the United States, the profession with the highest suicide rate in the country is physicians, and it's almost 2X the general population. Female physicians can be as much as 400% higher than the general population of women in this country. We're projected to have a PCP shortage, a primary care shortage of up to 40,000 PCPs by 2034, and we have an aging population with more chronic conditions. So we need AI to be able to help us augment what the clinicians are able to do. Most PCPs in our country have about 2,000 to 3,000 patients they're caring for at any one time, and they don't have access to the information that helps them manage that population like they need to. And that's really where technology steps in.

Gemma Allen

>> And that is so, first of all, kind of like harrowing to hear because it's such an important job, but also such a stressful job, I'm sure. And part of that stress is probably based the fact that you feel like you can't help people the way they need to be helped.

Aric Coffman

>> You nailed it.

Gemma Allen

>> Yeah.

Aric Coffman

>> They actually call it a moral injury is the way they define it.

Gemma Allen

>> Oh.

Aric Coffman

>> So when you look at burnout, another stat, there's over a 50% burnout rate for PCPs in this country. And what that means is when you're in there, they don't even have the empathy to be able to engage with you in the way that they need to. And not because they don't want to, but because they're burned out. And so what we're trying to provide are alternative resources so that their stress goes down, their fulfillment goes up and then we are able to sustain careers, and that actually sustains that patient provider relationship longer. It's really, really important.

Gemma Allen

>> When we think about things like access to information, access to data, GDPR, patient records, et cetera, some folks are of the belief that like, yes, the US has a health tech problem or an insurance problem per se. I mean, that's a common challenge, right? But also somewhat of a policy problem and that can kind of vary state by state.

Aric Coffman

>> Yes.

Gemma Allen

>> How does that impact your business? Are there states where you feel like it's easier to land and impact ?

Aric Coffman

>> So part of the reason that we're in the segment that we're in is it's a federal program. So we don't have to deal, like in Medicaid, we don't have to deal with the same state to state variation. We're dealing with a national program. There can still be variances from state to state, but it's not like it is with Medicaid. From a policy perspective, I think data interoperability is something that could be addressed from a policy perspective that would change the way that we consume data and information, and give us more speed to action. And that's really the key is having information timely so that I know when that patient needs us and then we can create an intervention out to the home, maybe see them again in the hospital, whatever that intervention might be. There's too much slowness in what happens in the system today because of the interoperability challenges.

Gemma Allen

>> So we cover a lot of tech shows. We go on the road and we talk to a lot of tech founders and leaders and they all have this big, big bet that AI can solve all sorts of problems in society. I guess a skepticism I sometimes have is, yes, it can solve for Jamie Dimon's problems because got massive budgets, he can spend, spend, spend. There is, in some respects, if the innovation is there and the opportunity is there, those two worlds will always collide kind of naturally, right? In the healthcare space though, we know that a lot of hospitals are running Excel spreadsheets, they're run completely on prem solutions. Some of them never even made it to the cloud.

Aric Coffman

>> Exactly.

Gemma Allen

>> How are they now expected to suddenly avail of this sorcery of AI? What's the reality here? Be frank, bridge that gap a little bit.

Aric Coffman

>> I mean, I think it's going to be clunky and I think there will be winners and losers in all of it at the end of the day, but it has to happen. The system needs a new way of doing business, and I think that AI has a lot of promise. It's not going to be a silver bullet that cures everything because there's too many places that you have to apply those learnings, but I do think that it's something that's going to help get us out of this situation.

Gemma Allen

>> Well, I certainly hope so. So Aric, what's ahead for you and the team? What does the end of this year? We're halfway through. What does the next six months look like and what's on the big roadmap here?

Aric Coffman

>> Yeah. So we're really excited about 2026. It's been a great year for us. We're somewhat of a comeback story in terms of what we've done within the business and the teams have been working really, really hard to get us to a great place. And I think with the technology that we're now implementing in our business, I think that we're on a growth trajectory through the end of '26 and into 2027. And what I'd like us to do is to be able to expand outside of the five states that we're in heading into '27 and '28 to be able to reach more communities and provide more help than we can today.

Gemma Allen

>> Well, I certainly hope you're successful on that mission. I think America needs better healthcare and patients need better outcomes. So Aric, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.

Aric Coffman

>> Thank you so much for having me.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm Gemma Allen here at theCUBE Studio at the New York Stock Exchange. This is Mixture of Experts. Thanks for watching.