By Simeon Schindelman

With the recent headlines about the Amazon-Berkshire Hathaway-JPMorgan Chase plan to tackle rising healthcare costs, there has been a lot of talk about healthcare disruption in traditional employer-sponsored health benefits.

I welcome them into the growing field of healthcare disruption – it’s encouraging news for patients, providers, health plans, and other stakeholders committed to innovation.

But AMZN-BRK-JPM aren’t the first companies to band together in an attempt to rescue healthcare. And by Amazon’s own admission in a memo to its employees, its new partnership will take “a considerable amount of time” to come to fruition. What they have done is validate that brand-new, unconventional, non-traditional approaches to healthcare are necessary.

It’s been clear to me for many years that a new healthcare paradigm is critical to get American healthcare back on track. That’s what led me to introduce a new healthcare model in the Midwest that revolved around integrated health systems and provider competition. It worked remarkably well, quickly bringing down costs compared to traditional approaches. And data demonstrated that quality was better than with traditional approaches. Now I’ve brought this innovative model to the New York tri-state area with the introduction of Create^® health plans.

Create is the first and only marketplace in the NY/NJ/CT area in which local integrated healthcare delivery systems compete on cost and quality at the point of benefits enrollment to win loyal members. We designed and established Create as a way to provide better healthcare at lower cost, and to offer real choice through the introduction of market competition around the health system consolidation that’s been occurring across the country.

Create helps the best, most efficient providers win, and forces others to improve.

In Create, a recent Best in Biz winner for Most Innovative Health Care Product, a health system keeps all the members that select it as their medical network during the plan year, so that it is fully accountable for the care it renders and the prices it charges. This keepage of patients is a major break from the provider fragmentation that happens under traditional health plans today that keeps costs high, and care coordination ineffective. It’s a huge advancement beyond “attribution.”

In the past several weeks we’ve added more integrated delivery systems to the Create health system marketplace, including Saint Peter’s Healthcare System in New Jersey, which joins Mount Sinai Health System, Long Island Health Network, Englewood Hospital and Medical Center, and Hackensack Meridian Health. And we will shortly be announcing more high-profile partnerships with healthcare systems across the NY/NJ/CT Tri-state.

Similar to the AMZN-BRK-JPM alliance, there’s also the Health Transformation Alliance (HTA) – a group of 40+ major US corporations, including American Express, FedEx, IBM, Verizon, and Johnson & Johnson –  collaborating to fix our broken healthcare system. They are already working together, and recently endorsed a joint solution of Create with a major national health plan as a transformative cost and quality solution for their member companies in the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut tri-state area.

It will be interesting to see how the AMZN-BRK-JPM collaboration unfolds. In the meantime, Create is making headway in healthcare disruption – an idea that is taking hold among employers looking for better, more affordable healthcare.