Yesterday’s Advisor presented Andrew Ceccon’s first five steps for helping employees be better ( and less expensive) healthcare consumers. Today, steps six and seven, plus an introduction to the program that helps companies set up wellness programs with great ROIs.
Ceccon, former chief marketing officer at A.D.A.M., a provider of healthcare content and benefits tools for employers, health plans, and healthcare organizations, is president of Ceccon Marketing.
[Go here for steps one to five]
Step Six: Provider Quality
If we ask employees to be consumers, they have to know the products they are buying—that is, the doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, drugs, health plans, and procedures. The reality is that there is scant data that the average person can decipher to help them, says Ceccon.
What’s required?
- Intuitive, unbiased quality ratings
- Standard system for assessing doctor quality
Step Seven: Cost Negotiation
The final step in getting employees to be better healthcare consumers is to help them find out what medical services cost. The goal is to empower patients to predict and negotiate medical costs in advance.
What’s required?
- Education on the economics. Few but the insurance cognoscenti understand how the healthcare system works. In the copay days, employees were not driven to scrutinize doctor bills and insurance payments. Now they must pay attention.
Corporate wellness programs show great ROI. And they are win-win—employees feel better and are more productive, and employers reap the benefits. Even small improvements make a difference. Test drive Workplace Wellness with no cost or risk.
What’s desired?
- Price transparency. Lack of transparency is a major impediment to true consumerism. One of the most interesting examples of transparency at work is LASIK surgery. Because it is rarely covered by health plans, it has acted like a commodity. Practitioners openly advertise prices which have steadily gone down while quality has been driven up. Indeed, anticipating costs may not be easy for many procedures; nevertheless, clarity is imperative to assist the consumer.
HR departments who assist employees with consumer-driven health care will enjoy gains such as appreciation and smarter utilization of company’s programs, reduction in HR distractions, a paperless environment, improved perception of HR’s service, and a healthier, more productive workforce, Ceccon concludes.
The consumer drive health care approach is now a part of your complete wellness program. Well-structured and well-run wellness programs can generate ROIs of up to 300 percent—music to management’s ears! But the key words are “well-structured” and “well-run.” Poorly structured programs just spin their wheels—no health benefit and no positive ROI, either.
Many readers have told us that BLR’s comprehensive guidebook, Workplace Wellness: Healthy Employees, Healthy Families, Healthy ROI, has helped them get programs up and running that achieve wellness objectives with a great ROI while avoiding the legal hassles that, these days, seem to accompany any worthwhile venture in HR.
Wellness—NO downside! Impressive ROI, so management is happy. Better health, so employees are happy. And that means HR is happy! BLR’s Workplace Wellness is the key to developing your workplace wellness program.
It’s a comprehensive guide that takes you step-by-step through setting up a program, from convincing management all the way through creating and implementing a viable plan for your workplace. The guide also includes a vast collection of ready-to-use forms, handouts, and checklists that both structure your program and provide the metrics to prove its effectiveness to management’s satisfaction.
If you’d like to examine Workplace Wellness: Healthy Employees, Healthy Families, Healthy ROI on a no-cost, no-obligation basis for 30 days, we can arrange for you to do so. Let us know and we’ll be happy to set it up.