Tech companies offer to save health insurers from ACA despair

Health insurers have organized an annual convention that looks like a software industry conference.

America’s Health Insurance Plans began its three-day AHIP Institute event today in Las Vegas.

The conference agenda includes major sessions on regulatory and marketing topics, including a look at health care system player consolidation and “How to work with the government as your largest customer.”

But many of the sessions focus on the same topics that could be on the agenda of a Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference.

Lynne Chou O’Keefe, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, one of the Menlo Park, California-based venture capital firms that helped turn Silicon Valley into Silicon Valley, led a session on digital health startups that also featured James Sinclair, a managing director at New York-based Goldman Sachs.

Related: AHIP meeting: Wizards of R’s

Another session will focus on the complicated risk-adjustment process that Medicare Advantage plans and Affordable Care Act (ACA) public exchange plans are supposed to use to equalize plan enrollee health risk levels.

Many vendors are offering to help AHIP members with overall population health management, and their confusion over ACA risk management.