Pump Up Your Organization's Healthcare Value

If you think you found every way to squeeze more value out of the healthcare dollars your organization spends, think again. The last few years have forced all of us to come up with new and more efficient ways to get things done. It’s the same for healthcare cost management, and reconsidering the status quo. With the latest innovations in healthcare, here are three key areas that deserve a closer look:

Know your people. Different generations consume healthcare information in distinctive ways, and also vary in their relationships with healthcare providers. With four to five generations in a single workforce, it is important to understand their differences, and put in place targeted communication strategies and tools to improve engagement regardless of the generation.

Rethink provider cost and quality efforts. This topic may not seem novel, but continually addressing it is critical in getting more value out of healthcare. There are newer methodologies to help employees do an even better job of choosing high quality, lower cost providers. If you haven’t reviewed how you are supporting your employees with these decisions in the past year or so, now is the time to take action.

Review the next generation of health plans. There is a new generation of health plan administrators with platforms that determine benefits based on a provider’s quality of care. These plans enable employees to search their provider network and see their variation in copayments by procedure and provider. For example, if an employee is seeking care for a knee arthroscopy, they’ll see a lower copayment amount for physicians who rank in the top percentiles for quality. If they search for a hip procedure, they may find the same physician in the results as the knee procedure, but the provider may rank lower for this type of service and therefore have a higher copayment.

On top of steering toward higher quality, lower cost providers – these programs also guide the employee (i.e., employee or plan member) through a shared decision-making process to help determine whether surgery is even the best option. This often results in the employee choosing a less invasive, and lower cost, treatment option with equal or better outcomes than surgery.

We’re here to help.

With the latest innovations in healthcare, there are a myriad of new methods and strategies that offer greater cost containment potential. Starting with these three areas alone can help you gain more efficiency and value for your healthcare dollars.