S3 Ep46: Bringing Real Health Equity for Healthier Lives—featuring Andrew Toy and Carladenise Edwards

Health equity starts with human equity.

In this episode, Andrew Toy, President and incoming CEO at Clover Health, and Carladenise Armbrister Edwards, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Henry Ford Health and board member at Clover Health, talk about finding technology solutions and personalized approaches that bring accurate health equity, enabling people to live longer, healthier, happier lives. Clover Health is a company that uses a distributed care model focused on the Medicare Advantage population, using its resources on the people who need it, when, where, and how they need it. Andrew and Carladenise discuss the responsibility that is health equity and why barriers like misaligned structures, incentives, and values have made it a hard-to-achieve goal. They also speak about how being aware of the problem at hand and committing to kindness and justness can be the starting point to building health equity.

Learn more about Clover Health’s distributed care model and its leaders’ take on health equity! 

About Andrew Toy:

Andrew Toy is the President at Clover Health, where he is responsible for driving the vision for how technology and analytics can improve the lives of Clover's members. Andrew joined Clover from Google, where he coordinated enterprise activities for the Android team and ran Machine Learning, Enterprise Search, and Analytics for the G-Suite team. Before that, he was the CEO and co-founder of Divide, a company focused on creating a split between work and personal data on mobile devices, which was acquired by Google in 2014. He earned his BS and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University.

About Carladenise Armbrister Edwards:

Dr. Carladenise Armbrister Edwards has served as the Chief Strategy Officer at Henry Ford Health, a $6B private non-profit system in Southeast Michigan; Providence, a $26B Catholic healthcare system with over 50 hospitals across seven Western states; and Alameda Health System, a public hospital authority located in Oakland, California. As the principal advisor to the CEO and executive team, she has led system-wide strategic planning, M&A, and other partnership ventures, business development, clinical and operational transformation initiatives, government affairs, marketing, and communications, population health, and managed care contracting. Dr. Edwards also served as Founding President and CEO of Cal eConnect, Inc., a nonprofit corporation that governed California's electronic Health Information Exchange. Additionally, she has held executive leadership roles in Georgia's Department of Community Health, Florida’s Agency for Healthcare Administration, and the US Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Edwards joined Clover Health’s Board of Directors in July 2022. Dr. Edwards holds a Ph.D. in Medical Sociology from the University of Florida, a master's degree in Education and Psychological Services, and a bachelor's degree in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Things You’ll Learn:

• Medicare Advantage is the perfect example of how to provide health equity, as it gives money and resources to prevent illness and treat illness in a personalized manner.
• Decentralizing care can make clinicians more efficient and help them perform at the top of their license with the help of technology and analytics.
• The current hospital experience could be more efficient and scary, but it can be fixed using different tools and models of care.
• Organizations like Clover must ensure everybody gets access to the care they need, taking into account their social, economic, and environmental factors.
• Structural barriers, such as the structure of insurance and societal values, often create a disincentive to providing care to those who need it most.
• Everyone can be part of health equity by taking care of themselves first.
• Hospitals should be places where we go for certain aspects of our healthcare, not all of them. 

Resources:

• Connect with and follow Andrew Toy on LinkedIn.
• Connect with and follow Carladenise Armbrister Edwards on LinkedIn.
• Follow Clover Health on LinkedIn.
• Visit the Clover Health Website!