Can you solve the health care problem at your organization?

There’s a lot more to a comprehensive wellness program than just nutrition and exercise classes. It requires getting your employees to think about their health and how they spend their health care dollars in a new way.

A few months ago I read The Company that Solved Health Care. The author, John Torinus sets out these five steps for how his company has helped to reduce health care costs. Check out his site here: http://johntorinus.com/how-to-solve-health-care/

His steps are simple and can be implemented at any size organization. We can show you how.

1. Adopt a consumer-driven health plan (CDHP). That means setting up personal health accounts for employees – either an HSA or HRA – as an offset to higher deductibles and co-insurance. Behavior immediately changes, since plan members are spending their own money. Over-utilization disappears. Consumerism appears. Employees start shopping for price, service and quality. Lifestyles improve. CDHP premiums are typically 20%-40% below those of standard plans.

2. Make prices and quality transparent. Various web sites in different regions of the country display prices from providers, and some show quality ratings. Find the one that works best in your market and make it user-friendly for your employees. Prices vary by a factor of three-to-one in most markets for medical procedures, so huge savings are available with sharp consumer information.

3. Identify Centers of Value (COV). Not all providers are created equal. Some have far better quality metrics than their peers. They are often the hospitals and clinics that have adopted lean management disciplines. Some lean hospitals have, for instance, eliminated infections in their operating rooms. That’s where you want to be for a procedure. Prices often track with quality. In other words, better quality and lower prices go together. COV prices are often 30%-40% less than standard, and some offer a comprehensible all-in bill. Publish a list of the Centers of Value in your market.

4. Emphasize primary care. Intimate primary care keeps people out of hospitals, which are dangerous and expensive places. One night in a hospital can cost $5,000. Preferably, bring a clinic on-site at your organization, even if it is staffed by a nurse practitioner instead of a doctor. If that’s not possible, find a nearby clinic that will offer convenient primary care. Costs drop by about one-third when your own primary care doctors and their staffs become the front end of the medical system.

5. Get serious about chronic disease. The experts agree that the 80-20 rule applies in health care, that 80% of the costs are incurred by 20% of the people, those with chronic disease conditions. An effective primary care team can provide a medical home where chronic conditions, like diabetes, asthma, hypertension and depression, can be treated in a systematic, proactive manner. These conditions can be managed so they don’t become catastrophic and horribly expensive. You owe it to your employees to create a support system to help them avoid poor health and the hospital.

These steps can be taken at any business that offers health insurance to its employees. Here in Colorado, the Center for Improving Value in Health Care is working on a database that will shed light on health care costs and outcomes. This database will provide comparative cost and quality information that will help stimulate competition, which will result in lower cost and higher quality care. According to the CIVHC website this data should be available to customers sometime next year.

Getting serious about chronic disease also means preventing chronic disease by helping your employees identify early risk factors and doing something about them before they become costly chronic conditions. Our annual assessment process helps employees keep tabs on their risk factors and our programs encourage and educate employees about how to modify their risk factors.

You can see that by taking all of these ideas together, it is possible to dramatically bring down the cost of health care. Stop grumbling about health care costs and do something about it. Contact us today.