Kal Wahab, Chief Administrative Officer at Oregon Health and Science University

The Risky Health Care Business

What he does: Kal is the Chief Administrative Officer at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, OR and has over two decades of experience in health care, including 15 years in a combination of leadership roles on both the payer and provider side. At OHSU he is responsible for serving Medicaid members in the Portland Metro region and as the administrative lead for the MSO in the Office of OHSU Payer Strategy, serves clinicians in a Clinically Integrated Network participating in an MSSP ACO and various Medicare Advantage and commercial value-based care arrangements.

On risk: "Risk is one of those things that, especially underwriting risk for a population, that somebody has to take the risk, right? It's either the payer or the provider, or maybe potentially even the member, unknowingly … Sometimes it can be like a hot potato. People want to pass it around to somebody else and let them manage it. But I think the reason it's important to prepare for managing risk as a healthcare provider is that the days of being able to get your fee for service increases and the payer just leaving you alone those days are behind us. As a provider, you're not able to afford to not pay attention to this anymore … Preparing for it is probably the best way to go, instead of hiding your head in the sand and delaying it and prolonging it, because I see the danger is that if you prolong your preparation for this, for managing risk as a provider, you'll get to a point where a more advanced model would be imposed on you, and you may not have a choice, and you would be ill-prepared for managing that risk at that point."