Scott Wise, President & CEO, Valor Healthcare

Invest: spoke with Valor Healthcare President and CEO Scott Wise about the ways in which his company has expanded within the field of veteran healthcare through organic growth, strategic diversification, and acquisition as well as how Valor intends to continue that legacy of advancement by expanding into other departments and agencies of the federal government.

Could you provide an overview of Valor Healthcare’s vision and the unique services you provide?

Valor was founded in 2004, and we are celebrating our 20th anniversary this year. The company was established to answer a call from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in the late 1990s to bring primary care and mental health services to Veterans in the communities where they live. As a result, the VA Community Based Outpatient Clinic (CBOC) program was born to provide those services in the communities where they live rather than requiring Veterans to drive to the VA Medical Center, which can be one or more hours away. 

I joined Valor in 2007, when I was concurrently finishing my MBA with a focus on healthcare management. After a couple years as the Medical Director of Valor’s CBOC in Denton, I became the chief medical officer for the company. In 2012, Valor was sold to Humana, and I began overseeing both our medical and operations teams. I’ve had the honor and privilege of leading our company since 2014, when we became a subsidiary of Dallas-based Concentra, the country’s premier provider of occupational health care services. Since 2020, Valor has been opened by Trive Capital, a Dallas-based private equity firm. We now operate almost 70 locations for both federal government and commercial customers across the country.

What are Valor Healthcare’s strategic plans to ensure continued growth?

Our goal is to triple the company’s size over the next four to five years, and we’ll accomplish this through continuing to organically to grow the VA outpatient clinic business as well as expanding the services we provide to the VA to other federal government and private sector customers. For example, in our federal government business, we provide primary care, behavioral health, population health, data analytics, outpatient clinic design and construction, healthcare staffing, and program management. We are now providing remote patient monitoring, using wearables and home medical equipment that upload your data to the cloud so that care coordinators can better manage patients. The company’s growth will be fueled by delivering this suite of services to other agencies in the federal government as well as private/commercial payors.

For example, Valor has a contract with the Defense Health Agency (Department of Defense), including providing virtual health support services in Europe. Valor also holds prime and/or subcontracts with Health and Human Services, CDC, Homeland Security, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and others.

How is Valor Healthcare addressing growing demand for high quality healthcare?

As an Army veteran and physician, I emphasize delivering exceptional clinical care and outcomes for our patients and customers. Our commitment to leveraging data to drive superior clinical outcomes differentiates Valor Healthcare from all industry competitors and lifts the institutional clinical outcomes of the customers we serve.

What are the most significant challenges faced by Valor Healthcare today?

The primary challenge is the projection that by 2030 there will be a shortage of almost 50,000 primary care physicians and a nursing shortage almost five times that. One key tool to help mitigate the impact of those shortages is technology. This not only includes further expanding digital/telehealth capabilities but also by responsibly implementing other digital enablers — wearables (smart watches, rings, etc.), remote monitoring and early warning technologies, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) as a few examples.

While many describe the coming of AI as the next industrial revolution, we must ensure that these technologies can be implemented in healthcare workflows safely. I recently read an article comparing diagnostic accuracy from a clinical data set in three groups: physicians using no AI assistance, physicians using AI assistance, and an AI/ML tool with no physician involved at all. The first group (physicians only) selected the correct diagnosis 74% of the time. Physicians using AI assistance scored 75%, arguably an immaterial difference. Interestingly, the AI/ML tool by itself, with no physician input/involvement scored 91%. Now, this was a relatively small study, and there are many, many other variables that impact patient care, but it certainly highlights that the most effective healthcare providers of the near future will need to know how to use technology to augment the care we deliver, It will be equally important for our industry to proceed at a pace where the technology isn’t causing more problems than it solves.

How does Valor Healthcare prioritize employee retention and recruitment?

Talent acquisition and retention is always a major discussion in healthcare. Valor’s turnover rates are lower than industry averages with 18% for primary care providers versus the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics rate of 23-24% for the healthcare industry generally. I’m certainly not happy about our turnover rate, but within the context of the industry, we are thinking every day about how we can best retain our colleagues. We observed slightly higher turnover in nursing positions at Valor, and in response we named a new Chief Nursing Officer and are intentionally working to achieve magnet designation as a preferred employer for nurses through a program called Pathway to Excellence. We also partner with local healthcare professional training programs to attract talent and raise awareness of Valor Healthcare’s mission.

How does Valor attempt to keep healthcare affordable while delivering exceptional care?

The current buzzword in healthcare is “value-based care.” Unfortunately, despite spending more money per capita on healthcare than any country in the world, our clinical outcomes rank 16th. Not only is that incredibly disappointing, that spend is just not sustainable 

Caring for over 160,000 Veterans, Valor Healthcare is second only to VA itself in the direct delivery of primary care to U.S. Military Veterans. We’re currently working on a proposal with Veterans Affairs to create a pilot accountable care organization inside the VA healthcare system to integrate technology-enabled, value-based care.

What strategic initiatives are in place to further enhance healthcare services for veterans over the next few years?

We will continue to evolve our data analytics and population health capabilities and will expand our analytics team. In the next two years we anticipate acquisitions in three areas. Firstly, we are looking for companies providing behavioral health in the federal space, particularly if they are technology-enabled. A second area will be occupational health to leverage our experience with automakers like Stellantis and federal clients like Wildland Firefighters, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Secret Service. A final sector we are interested in pursuing is healthcare IT to further evolve our capabilities in population health and data analytics.