Will America's CEOs Get Serious About Obesity?
When the Wall Street Journal recently convened the CEO Council – 100 of the nation’s most influential business executives – to suggest issue priorities for the new Administration, one surprise was their recommendation that the obesity epidemic should be one of America’s top health care agenda items.
Clearly business leaders understand that obesity could potentially devastate America and its workforce. But it was the first time a leadership group publicly voiced this concern, placing their high-value imprimatur on the nation’s need to act.
Worksite Clinics Help Employers Take Control of Health Care
Brian Klepper
From American City Business Journals
In late 2005, Hurst Boiler, an innovative manufacturer outside Thomasville, Georgia, determined it could probably do better on health care by installing a worksite clinic for its 220 employees and their families. At that time, Hurst was paying $4,757 per employee per year (PEPY) for medical care and pharmacy. Hurst recruited Atlanta-based Worksite Rx (www.worksiterx.com) to open a clinic in March 2006 and, by July 2008, its costs for medical care, pharmacy and the clinic had plummeted 32 percent, to $3,225 PEPY.
But this figure doesn’t consider the effects of premium inflation: 7.7, 6.1 and 5.0 percent nationally in 2006-08, respectively, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Without a clinic, Hurst’s 2008 health coverage costs reasonably would have risen to about $5,700 PEPY. In real terms, the clinic dropped their total health costs (for medical care, pharmacy and clinic) by 44 percent in fewer than 30 months. An added bonus, sick days dropped by half a day per employee per year.
What Is Walgreens Thinking?
From CDHC Solutions Magazine
Download the published article of "What is Walgreens Thinking?"
Reduce Costs and Improve Quality With a Myriad of Alternative Care Choices
Over the long slog of the last several decades, health care’s various sectors have become increasingly inward-focused, unaware that their roles are within a larger system, and insensitive to the larger well-being of both the patient and the purchaser. Primary care has been compromised. There is rampant excess in the specialties. Health plans have often abrogated cost and quality management in favor of simply bundling, financing, and marketing health care services. And employers have become frustrated with unrelenting, rampant cost growth.
These dynamics have created an opportunity for vendors who can establish systems that identify and manage health/financial risk directly on behalf of employers and others who own that risk.
Brian Klepper, Healthcare Performance Inc.
Letter To The Editor: Teens Should Have Sex Ed Information
After 4 years of only abstinence-only sex education funding, new data show that one in four American teens has a sexually transmitted disease with lifelong consequences. One in seven has more than one. If we actually cared about our children, we'd equipment them with the knowledge and tools they need to get through their adolescence unscathed.
Will Primary Care Be Re-Empowered By An Ailing Economy
In HealthLeaders Online
Richard Reece MD and Brian Klepper PhD
The financial crisis, with its tightening of credit, could pave the way for the re-empowerment of primary care physicians.
How TPAs Can Win By Taking The Lead On Transparency
They show average 2005 diagnostic and treatment resource use by physicians for different conditions, holding the outcomes steady. What we find is a single-market cost variation that ranges from 2.4 times in the case of knee surgery by Orthopedic surgeons to 8.6 times for urinary tract infections by Internal Medicine physicians.
Business leaders in particular are startled by this data because they have typically assumed that most doctors – and certainly THEIR
doctors – know and follow best practices, and that they treat similar conditions in similar ways. This table betrays that myth, of course, and makes it clear that doctors (or hospitals (see Figure 2) and other services) approach any problem in vastly different ways. The result is huge variations in health care outcomes and costs, across all markets.
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