Luca Valsasina - General Manager, VitalAire, Germany and Romania (Air Liquide Group)

Meeting highlights:

• Strategic Expansion & Value-Based Healthcare Focus: Upon transitioning from Poland to lead VitalAire Germany, Luca Valsasina aimed to grow one of the group’s largest and most diverse markets by ​expanding its​​​ portfolio and embedding value-based healthcare (VBHC) principles, prioritizing patient outcomes at optimal cost​ for the system​. 
• Germany’s Complexity Offers Innovation Potential: Germany’s highly fragmented healthcare system, with over 90​ potential​ insurers, creates operational complexity but allows room for innovation. This environment supports flexible, win-win solutions aligned with VBHC. 
• Home Care as a Cost-Effective and Preferred Model: ​​Home Healthcare is a key lever for the healthcare system to deliver high-quality care at the optimal cost. Technologies like telemonitoring help enhance quality while controlling costs. 
• Strong Internal Culture and Talent Development: VitalAire Germany fosters a strong sense of purpose among employees by connecting their work directly to patient outcomes. Programs like the ALLEX graduate rotation scheme, internal mobility, and flexible work structures help attract and retain talent. 
• Becoming a True Therapy Partner: Luca Valsasina’s vision is to evolve VitalAire from a product provider to a “therapy partner,” working closely with healthcare professionals and patients to offer integrated solutions. He takes pride in recent VBHC pilots, product ​developments​​, ​and partnerships that reflect this transformation. 

EF: What goals did you set for yourself when you were appointed GM of Germany, and what did you hope to accomplish there? 

LV: Compared to my experience in Poland, Germany is a considerably larger market, and our range of activities there is more extensive. My primary plan was to keep expanding the current initiatives in Germany while identifying new expansion opportunities. Additionally, I intended to ​accelerate the ​shift toward a value-based healthcare model that has been the cornerstone of Air Liquide's approach in other countries. As the Air Liquide Group, we are working together to promote value-based healthcare, and it is a crucial model in every country where we do business. 

​​​Value-based healthcare (VHBC) takes different forms in every country. Since every healthcare system is distinct, it must always have a local connotation. Value-based healthcare is central to our strategy, but the overall approach and its fundamentals remain constant. My goal was to grow and transform our already broad portfolio of activities, thanks to VBHC’s offerings while looking for selected new opportunities for development in new therapeutic areas. 

EF: How do you want to broaden Germany's diversity or identify new development opportunities? 

LV: ​Our ​history began with ​respiratory activities, such as ​oxygen in the hospital, progressed to oxygen at home, and subsequently developed a wide range of additional activities. Our primary business in Germany and most European nations is respiratory, which accounts for over half of our revenues. In Germany, we also have a lot of infusion activity, especially in diabetes. We have made significant progress in other, more specialized fields, such as immunological deficiencies and p​A​H. 

​​Our ​​​​activity is intensive care, which consists of more than 30 community care centers and involves extremely critical patients​ to whom we provide 24/7 intensive care​.

​​EF: What do you think Germany's strategic importance is to such a large global corporation, and how would you convince headquarters to bring resources to Germany? 

LV: The sheer size of the German market and its large population make ​​it important. Bey Germany's healthcare system is highly fragmented but has strengths and challenges. In Germany, there are over 90 distinct health insurance​ providers. In contrast, most European countries only have one healthcare plan, which is the case in France, Poland. 

On the one hand, Germany's fragmented healthcare system adds complexity because there are more negotiations, procedures, and ways to accomplish the same tasks. Still, it also gives you some flexibility because you can talk to those health insurance companies and be creative, suggesting new approaches that might be more difficult to implement in other nations with monolithic, ​more centralised​​ systems. Germany's system is strong and flexible enough to innovate, which is essential for value-based healthcare. We want to promote and provide the German healthcare system with value-based healthcare, an innovative solution that benefits everyone. It is a solution that helps patients and the healthcare system. It enables us to address the primary challenge of the future, namely, ​addressing the growing number and needs of ​patients ​despite the ​constraints of healthcare insurance funds. 

EF: You spoke about introducing innovations with solutions that benefit all parties. What makes VitalAire's implementation of a value-based healthcare system so crucial? 

LV: Value-based care aims to provide your patients with the finest results at the ​optimal​​ price. This is essentially one of the primary answers to the healthcare system's problems going forward. We are all aware that the population will age and that chronic illnesses will become more prevalent in the years to come. Therefore, in the upcoming years, the number of patients, their complexity, and the level of treatment will all continue to increase. They do not appear very good when looking at age pyramids, of which the German age pyramid is one of the most distorted. We know that the amount of care that must be given will grow rapidly over the next 20 to 30 years. We also know that budgets will have difficulty keeping up with this exponential increase. Value-based healthcare can help with it. The issue is how to provide the ​optimal​​     ​ care for​ an​ increasing ​number of ​patients. ​Homecare treatments, combined with a VBHC approach, will be an essential way to tackle this challenge, which is why VitalAire is committed to value-based healthcare.  

Since treating a patient at home is ​​less expensive than treating them in a hospital, home care is not only the most economical option in many places these days but also the type of treatment patients prefer. Instead of remaining in the hospital​ or other care facilities​, ​most people would​     ​​rather stay at home. Here, we mix the most economical approach for the system with the best result for the patient. Thus, in contrast to several other types of care, home care alone may be a type of value-based healthcare. Thanks to modern technologies, we can all be innovative in caring for patients, even at home, and adopt methods that use fewer resources while producing excellent results. Naturally, this will vary based on the pathology and the type of patients you care for. For instance, telemonitoring is one technology that can significantly improve patient care without requiring many doctors or nurses to visit patients' homes daily. That is one of the most important factors that can raise the treatment standard and control spending.  

EF: What tactics have you implemented to add value to your team, perhaps, and make working at VitalAire more appealing? 

LV: It is the sense of purpose we provide. Everyone wants purpose and to know that what they do matters. That is why the purpose we bring to our employees is one of the key elements. In some cases, some companies have tried to find the purpose of their actions, but that is not an issue for us. One of the best things we can do for new employees in our company is sending them on a tour with one of our oxygen drivers, for example, delivering oxygen to patients at home, or spend a day in one of our community care centers that take care of kids with severe diseases.  

Everyone wants meaning and to feel that their actions have an impact. For this reason, one of the most important factors is the purpose we provide for our staff. Some businesses have sincerely tried to determine the reasons for their actions, but that is not a problem for us. For instance, one of our best practices for new hires is to tour with one of our oxygen drivers, who provide oxygen to patients at their homes, or to spend a day at one of our community care centers, which care for children with serious illnesses. If you do this as an employee, you will not wonder whether your work counts if you do that once as one of our workers. Our diabetes team, which consists of highly motivated staff, demonstrates this. Since they are directly impacted by and interested in diabetes, ​some ​of our colleagues chose to work in this field despite having the disease themselves. 

We provide our workers with a genuine sense of purpose that comes naturally from the work and isn't fabricated. Additionally, we have a pleasant workplace that is dynamic and complex, so you never get bored. The healthcare industry is also changing quickly. We have a highly innovative workplace with rapidly evolving technology, which is fascinating. Of course, we also have a work structure that allows people to manage their personal and professional lives. In a competitive job market, these factors and all the programs we can provide help us draw in talent. 

Last but not least, we provide a great deal of internal mobility, which is not unique to VitalAire but to the Air Liquide Group as a whole. We employ recent graduates with promise through our Alex Program, which aims to draw in fresh talent. In addition to working for us at VitalAire Germany, they are required to complete ​​three months of experience abroad​ in another Air Liquide entity twice​, which is a fantastic opportunity for them to go to other countries and try out different things. A handful of our team members are now doing that; one is interning in France, while another completed an internship in Austria some time ago. This internal internship means you are still working for the same company but in a different country. 

That is excellent for recent graduates and the Air Liquide organization as a whole. It is an excellent internal strategy that allows you to grow and change within the organization and assume ​many​​ roles​​ across numerous countries. The organization is prepared to push a good, motivated employee who wants to grow outside of their official training if there is an opportunity. It is a fantastic strategy for attracting and nurturing talent. 

EF: Is VitalAire working on any projects to promote medical education and raise awareness among healthcare professionals about your products? 

LV: In some ways, this is our daily business, as we frequently serve as the technological arm of healthcare professionals. For instance, we educate medical personnel about ventilators and their operation. We share our technological expertise on the device with ​medical professionals​​;​ we constantly strive to support the medical field with new ​​technology, such as telemonitoring; however, these technologies will not replace medical professionals. They are the medical profession's enhanced capabilities. 

In its most basic version, telemonitoring might be problematic because it actually generates a lot of alarms, such as "no data transmission" or "disconnected modem." It is inefficient and poor use of a doctor's time to spend time dealing with this type of data. The appropriate degrees of knowledge must be well-balanced. In order for the doctors to concentrate their limited medical time on the most important matters, they need someone who can help them with technical matters​ (for example technicians, or with less critical medical alerts (nurses)​. There are numerous methods to put this up. For instance, a team might prefilter all telemonitoring notifications so that the doctor only pays attention to the most critical ones. The most effective way to care for patients in the healthcare system is to combine medical, professional, and technological expertise with someone in between who ​coordinates everything. 

EF: When you reflect on your career path, what are some of your proudest moments as the head of the company in your area, and what do you hope to achieve in the future? 

LV: I am very proud of the team's commitment to the patients, their treatment, and the company's continued expansion. I'm also proud of some of the progress we've made in value-based healthcare; we've implemented some excellent pilots and some innovative ideas. Based on the principles of value-based healthcare, we have developed attractive offers for certain patients, such as VitalAire Plus​, VitalAire 360​ or special offers for some patients. ​The primary goal for the upcoming year is to continue the company's transformation into what we refer to as a therapy partner, which is something I am really looking forward to. The foundation of the value-based healthcare concept is a business that can serve as a therapy partner for both patients and medical personnel.