Issue link: https://nebusinessmedia.uberflip.com/i/1541563
C T I N N O V A T O R S , 2 0 2 5 2 7 who visited the emergency room nearly 30 times in a year. His care team stepped in and taught him and his caregiver about nutrition and blood sugar management, helped him get a continuous glucose monitor and made sure he kept up with specialist visits. As a result, his blood sugar levels improved significantly, and he went two months without a trip to the ER. Another innovation Trumble has introduced is direct-to-employer contracts. SoNE has negotiated about a dozen such deals with self-in- sured large and small businesses. Instead of paying premiums to an insurance company, employers pay their employees' medical claims directly to the provider, although an insurer or third-party adminis- trator handles back-end administration. To date, Trumble said, these contracts have reduced employees' out-of-pocket expenses by 58% and lowered overall costs by 27%. The road ahead While Trumble has made significant progress at SoNE Health, expanding her mission more broadly across the state has been harder. When she came to Connecticut from Massachusetts, Trumble said she was shocked by how different the two states were even though they share a border. She found providers and policymakers here didn't fully understand value-based care, which made it harder to build momentum. "I came from an environment where this was, you know, kind of in the drinking water, and maybe assumed that Connecticut was a little more advanced than it actually was," she said. While there are organizations and individuals promoting val- ue-based care here, "what I don't see, at the state level, is a policy position moving it forward," she said. She's encouraged, though, by Connecticut's participation in the AHEAD (Advancing All-Payer Health Equity Approaches and De- velopment) model, a voluntary federal initiative that seeks to curb the growth of healthcare costs, improve population health and advance health equity. Connecticut was one of three states chosen for the pro- gram, and Trumble recently was appointed to the advisory committee developing the state's plan. And while she worries about looming federal healthcare cuts, she's hopeful the impact will fast-track value-based care, much the way the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated telehealth. "Whether we like it or not, the federal budget cuts are going to force the need for innovation and creativity and looking at the system in a different way," she said. I