BRANDON NEWMAN, CEO OF XEVANT HAS BEEN SELECTED BY THE JUDGES OF WORLD BIZ MAGAZINE’S ANNUAL AWARDS TO BE A RECIPIENT OF THE TOP 100 CEOS IN INNOVATION AWARD 2021. THIS SELECTION FOLLOWS A STRINGENT PROCESS THAT EVALUATED OVER 40,000 NOMINEES TO SELECT THE EXCLUSIVE LIST OF 100 WINNERS.
Brandon Newman has a dynamic, 30-year leadership career spearheading several health technology businesses with an emphasis on growth, revenue, and operational excellence. He has run many high-growth environments, including start-ups, turnarounds, and $1B+ dollar businesses. As a serial entrepreneur, he has a proven record of founding new businesses and advancing them through growth and acquisition, merger, or roll-up including ScripPoint, Veridian, and AviaraMD. Since co-founding Xevant in 2017, an innovative business intelligence company delivering client optimization solutions that create value for its customers in the payer, consulting and PBM markets, Brandon has led a diverse team of employees spanning 3 continents comprising data and software, sales and marketing, account management, and operations. He has proven to be a driving force for vision, new market strategy, revenue growth, technology development, and partner alliances.
“Healthcare is a $4 trillion business with 25% considered wasteful. Historic approaches to eliminate waste within healthcare has required a massive amount of time and resources to run and analyze reporting by the end-customer to hopefully reduce wasteful spending by 1%-3%, months to years after wasteful costs have already incurred. Our motivation isn’t necessarily groundbreaking but simply utilizes new technology and processes to achieve greater results with fewer resources and in less time.”
How is Xevant improving the healthcare industry?
As we eliminate the extensive time and resources required to manage healthcare costs, we will begin to whittle away at the $1 trillion in current wasteful spending. We will begin to see a largely broken US healthcare system start to see signs of improvement. Reduction in cost yields greater healthcare affordability, accessibility, and availability. This self-perpetuating cycle of improving cost and quality can drive up overall individual health, which in-turn helps further improve the healthcare system. The only way to truly save our healthcare system is to make it more affordable, accessible, and available. Xevant and our team of passionate industry leaders make that our daily commitment.
Why is Xevant’s unique approach crucial at this time?
Healthcare is a $4 trillion business with 25% considered wasteful. Historic approaches to eliminate waste within healthcare has required a massive amount of time and resources to run and analyze reporting by the end-customer to hopefully reduce wasteful spending by 1%-3%, months to years after wasteful costs have already incurred. Our motivation isn’t necessarily ground-breaking but simply utilizes new technology and processes to achieve greater results with fewer resources and in less time. To that end, we’ve built a revolutionary analytics platform that infuses automation and alerting throughout the data analysis process and then reviews and analyzes billions of healthcare events and transactions to instantly identify top concern areas and wasteful spending in real-time. The result is faster, more accurate data and a greater reduction of healthcare waste creating affordability, accessibility, and availability of healthcare to all US citizens. It’s a goal we can all align with.
Share with us some of the specific approaches Xevant is leading the industry with?
Pharmacy benefits is a complex environment, using the traditional, decades-old playbook to manage pharmacy benefits performance. Today, there are 100,000+ drugs and drug formulations, 70,000+ pharmacies, 1M+ providers, and 100M+ patients all with perceived competing priorities. With all of the latest technological advances, it is time to toss the old playbook for boosting pharmacy benefits optimization by leveraging these three things: big data, analytics automation, and alert-based action.
1. We have mountains of healthcare and pharmacy data at our fingertips that continue to accumulate at an accelerating pace.
2. We have access to comprehensive analytic automation tools that will enable a careful analysis of the vast sea of data on a daily basis to
immediately identify trends and patterns in cost and utilization.
3. We have near real-time alerts enabling pharmacy experts to make incredibly informed decisions to boost pharmacy benefits optimization on a daily basis to improve performance.
Despite the relatively complicated nature of big data, the ability to leverage it within health benefits and achieve desired results is finally within our grasp. This big opportunity is designed for employers, brokers, consultants, health plans, administrators, and PBMs to ultimately begin working together and expand our collective ability. By doing this and fully embracing big data, analytics automation, and alerts, we will be able to deliver optimized pharmacy benefits performance.
“As far back as I can remember, I’ve been a problem solver. Deep down I knew that with enough work, time, and ingenuity, solutions would be found to any challenge.”
What brought you to this specific career path?
As far back as I can remember, I’ve been a problem solver. Deep down I knew that with enough work, time, and ingenuity, solutions would be found to any challenge. Fast forward to my first “real job” as an account manager in my early 20s, the job forced me to search through countless files to verify system results, making it painstakingly difficult to manage dozens of clients. Although I had no business building software, I knew this was just a problem that “work, time, and ingenuity” would solve and I set off to create software to automate the process. After a few weeks of late nights, trial and error configuration, and consulting every “real programmer” I knew, an automated “software” tool was born that improved our team’s efficiency and was used by the company for many years. I stumbled into the realization that solving problems through data, software, and automation would serve my career well. Nearly 25 years and a number of start-ups later, I’m still at it, attempting to solve some of the largest healthcare problems of our day.
What drives you as an innovative leader and entrepreneur?
As with many people who transition past the early years of their career, the guiding principles driving my interests, ambitions, and actions have become much simpler while becoming more core to who I am. Over time I have become much more aware of the “us and we” instead of the “me and my”, and this is the basis for my primary principles. It’s my belief that we have the power to achieve exponentially more as we lift our heads to look around us and seek the collective needs of a team. Making a decision that helps me and my goals but does it at the expense of the goals of others is myopic and inward, but when we act in the best interest of the collective team I often see “the magic” happen. It seems that each of my lifelong guiding principles like kindness, integrity, service, balance, and healthcare access and affordability, are each captured by maintaining an outward mindset that focuses on the success of the whole (team, industry, community, etc.) to maximize the success of the individual.
Can you give us more insights into your offering?
Most organizations that manage pharmacy benefits are heavily dependent upon lengthy and labor-intensive data aggregation, report processing and analysis hoping to uncover significant client and patient insights. Xevant’s revolutionary pharmacy benefits platform infuses real-time automation throughout the data analysis process accelerating and simplifying the painstaking task of report building for PBMs, TPAs, Health Plans, and Brokers. Automated alerts monitor plan performance and notify users of where to take action. Critical pharmacy analysis that took weeks, months or more can now be done instantly. The results are optimized business processes, reduced operating costs, and improved patient outcomes.
“Our mantra is “People before Profits”. We have heavily invested our time, money, resources, and heart into every talented and diverse employee that comes to Xevant each day ready to contribute their talent, expertise, and commitment towards reducing the cost of healthcare and improving patient outcomes.”
What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
Our mantra is “People before Profits”. We have heavily invested our time, money, resources, and heart into every talented and diverse employee that comes to Xevant each day ready to contribute their talent, expertise, and commitment towards reducing the cost of healthcare and improving patient outcomes. Although Xevant has created an incredibly robust automated platform that helps our clients to reduce cost by 15%, tomorrow they will need something more. It’s only through our People that we can deliver that future need that has an exponential value attached. That’s truly the real product we provide, and I couldn’t be prouder to pitch that value to whomever is interested.
What makes a good leader?
Through my life experiences, I have gained knowledge and wisdom that has shaped my personal philosophy on good leadership. I tell my team and prospective employees often that what we learned early in life during grade school needs to be the foundation for our approach to business. Most of us leave grade school with an understanding that the more we help others succeed, the greater our own successes will be. Unfortunately, we enter the business world and the first thing we are told is: “These are YOUR goals, YOUR objectives, and YOUR responsibilities.” I’ve learned, however, that the best all-around leaders go back to the fundamentals of human development and focus on “OUR goals…” The Outward Mindset (Arbinger Institute) is an approach that our entire company has embraced, and it truly has transformed how we work towards our collective vision.
When you realize there are dozens of people contributing towards your objectives, miracles unfold everyday that when combined together, have the power to achieve greater success than doing it the “corporate way.” Culture really does matter and it starts at the top. If done correctly, there is a trickle-down effect and your team will become the culture evangelists in order to prevent anything disrupting the results achieved with an outward mindset.
