Month: August 2018

Employers Are Using an Innovative Way to Soften the Financial Burden of High Deductible Health Plans

Healthcare

As a healthcare data technology company, the most common question we hear from employers is, “how can we lower our healthcare spending?” The high cost of healthcare has a significant impact on employer expenses. The Milliman Medical Index projects that in 2018 the average premium for a family of four is $28,166. While the magnitude of health costs is a reality for our employer clients, finding an effective way to manage these high costs is often their first priority.

When we drill down into cost-drivers, we consistently see a startling theme across employers—that only 5% of people are driving 51% of healthcare spending. A very small group of people with chronic conditions (such as diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, or cancer) are contributing to half of the total health spending. While this disproportionate spending is a reality within employer populations, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, this also holds true for Americans as a whole.

As a way to manage the rising cost of healthcare, nearly 40% of adults are covered by what is known as a high-deductible health plan. Under this model, employees share in a greater share of their health expenses, responsible for on average $5,248 of out of pocket medical costs each year. The thinking behind this way of cost-sharing with employees is that when employees are responsible for paying a greater share of their health expenses, that they will become better healthcare consumers by shopping for the best prices and avoiding unnecessary procedures. 

Unfortunately, in many of these cases the high out-of-pocket medical costs cause financial hardship on many people. A survey from the Kaiser Family Health Foundation found that 1/3 of adults have trouble paying their medical bills, and 73% have cut back on spending on food, clothing or basic household items to pay their medical bills. The Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households, an annual survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Board, found that 44 percent of adult Americans claim they would not have $400 in case of an emergency without turning to credit cards, family and friends, or selling their own possessions. When those who are financially strapped have mounting healthcare bills, the consequences can be personally devastating. A 2015 poll by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that 26 percent of those who took part in the survey claimed medical bills caused severe damage to their household’s financial wellbeing.

Because the impact of high healthcare deductibles causes such a financial hardship for individuals and their families, many recent studies have shown that this type of health plan causes individuals to delay necessary healthcare. Researchers from UC Berkeley and Harvard studied the results of a large employer’s choice to offer a high deductible plan over 2 years. Instead of finding evidence to support the theory that high-deductible plans make people take more charge of their health spending, they found no evidence to show that employees were comparing costs or cutting unnecessary services once they had a high healthcare deductible. They cut low-value health services at the same rate as they were cutting important medical services, causing the employer to question whether members were making the right choices for their long term health. Additional studies have found that the danger of high deductible health plans is that their members with the highest health risks have shown that they avoid necessary care and medications due to cost. 

On the other side of the phenomenon that 5% of people drive 51% of health costs, we see another theme that is equally surprising—half of plan members contribute to only 3% of total health spending. That’s right—a large proportion of costs come from a small number of people, yet a large number of people contribute very little to overall costs. Why is this? 

At BetaXAnalytics, when we look at employer utilization of health services we consistently find that between 10%-20% of members never see their doctor. These are the employees who either feel they simply “don’t have time” to see the doctor or “don’t have the money” to spend into their annual deductible. But it’s within this group of people who are not driving costs today where an employer’s greatest healthcare risks can lie. 

The answer for employers? Make it as easy as possible for members to get the care they need. One effective way to ensure that people aren’t avoiding necessary care is to remove the traditional financial and convenience barriers that prevent employees from seeing the doctor. Hooray Health provides a template for employers to solve this problem. They afford first dollar coverage for preventative, basic and urgent care visits with $0 deductibles, and $25 copays for all in-network visits. Their innovative network consists of over 2,400 retail clinics and urgent care centers across the country with extended hours and no appointments necessary. They also provide access to telemedicine visits via phone 24-hours a day, 7 days a week at no cost which makes getting necessary care quick and easy, even when work and family schedules make it difficult to go into a doctor’s office. Their app-based tools and live medical concierge are available 24/7 make finding care easy and convenient. As an added benefit to address employee concerns about prescription costs, Hooray Health offers a prescription discount card to ensure employees that they are receiving competitive prices for their medications.

Hooray Health removes financial and convenience barriers that prevent people from getting the care they need by making access to necessary care easy, convenient, and free for employees. This type of solution is particularly useful for employers with high deductible health plans where high out of pocket costs may deter employees and their families from seeking the necessary care that they need. While solutions like these remove barriers to care, they also save employers money by providing an affordable alternative to many of the care services needed by their members. Providing easy-to-use concierge-based access to a network of retail clinics, urgent care centers and telemedicine doctors ensures that employee health won’t neglect their health due to lack of money or lack of time. You can learn more by contacting them at info@hoorayhealthcare.com

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About BetaXAnalytics:

If you’re an employer who feels there’s got to be a better way to control health care costs, you’re on to something. And we can help. BetaXAnalytics partners with employers to use the power of their health data “for good” to improve the cost and quality of their health care. By combining PhD-level expertise with the latest technology, they help employers to become savvy health consumers, to save health dollars and to better target health interventions to keep employees well. For more insights on using data to drive healthcare, pharmacy and wellbeing decisions, follow BetaXAnalytics on Twitter @betaxanalytics, Facebook @bxanalytics and LinkedIn at BetaXAnalytics.

About Hooray Health:

Since its founding in 2017, Hooray Health has been committed to disrupting the health insurance industry by providing employers, individuals and their families with the assurance that their basic healthcare needs are covered. Here at Hooray Health, we believe that healthcare should be simple, honest, and affordable, that’s why whether you apply online or over the phone, the process is always simple, and acceptance is guaranteed. Partnered with over 2,300 urgent care and retail clinics, and a 24/7 medical concierge team, Hooray Health members know that no matter where they are or what time it is, their healthcare is there for them. Starting plans have a low monthly cost with no annual deductible, an affordable copay, and no surprise balance bills. Every day, Hooray Health is smashing the industry norms and bringing healthcare to all.

Image credit: iStockPhoto

Forget Flashy Technology: Here Are 3 Data and Analytics Best Practices Any Company Can Use Right Now

Data

The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades.


~Dr. Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google

Practically everyone is talking about using data and analytics to succeed today in business, but surprisingly companies are only deriving a fraction of the value that’s available to them in their data when they’re making decisions. The reasons for this vary across organizations, but often times it comes down to budget constraints, talent constraints, or lack of recognition from leadership that analytics will help their business to run better. During an interview in 2009, Google’s Chief Economist Dr. Hal R.Varian predicted, “The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades.” 

Let’s take a look at some of the highest-performing companies out there today. Over the past 5 years, there have been 13 companies that have managed to outperform the S&P 500 each year. And when you take a look at this elite group—which includes companies such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google—you find that the majority of these businesses are algorithmically-driven. These companies take in data constantly, and use this data in real time to update the user-experience. In their 2012 feature on big data, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson shared findings from their research that “companies in the top third of their industry in the use of data-driven decision making were, on average, 5% more productive and 6% more profitable than their competitors.” It is hard to deny that success in our respective businesses is not a function of how well we make use of the data available to us. 

So how does Human Resources (HR) fit in to this picture? HR may not be the first group that you think of when considering who should have a strategy around using data. However, HR has the weighty responsibility of managing the top expenses of a company—salaries, healthcare, and benefits. The 2018 Milliman Medical Index estimates that the cost of healthcare for a family of 4 this year will be upwards of $28,166. Yet approximately 20% of employer-sponsored health care spending is wasted each year due to unnecessary or preventable costs across the continuum of care. The rise of high deductible health plans mean that decisions made within HR on health plans and benefits are decisions that weigh heavily on their employees pocketbooks as well.  When we look at HR through the expense-management lens, we see that HR carries the company’s fiduciary responsibility to manage these expenses not just for the bottom line of the employer, but also for the sake of their employees’ wallets.

We often see companies who make the decision to start using data and analytics immediately start shopping for a tool to make use of their data. While this step may be right for some companies, there are a few foundational analytics best-practices that we recommend companies have in place before making any analytic technology investments.

1.      Understand the quality of your data. One of the biggest mistakes we see companies make is that they assume that just because a report comes from I.T. or from a vendor, that the data is correct. However, very rarely is the data captured by a company in “ready-to-use” form. IBM estimates that poor data quality cost American companies $3.1 trillion in 2016 alone. A recent study of 75 executives who assessed their own organizations data quality found that only 3% of their companies’ data met basic quality standards. Furthermore, understanding data quality is a fundamental issue within organizations, executives are more informed to understand how data quality affects their vendor partners as well. Every bit of data that we review is a piece of a much larger picture, and understanding the limitations of the quality of your company’s data helps to make a more accurate assessment of its insights.

2.      Develop your data strategy. Take a step back from day to day operations to decide how to data can help to inform your decisions. This affects what metrics you’re looking at, and how often you’re receiving it. Many companies are surprised to find that the process of developing a data strategy often means reducing the amount of reports people are looking at. A common assumption is that the more data we’re looking at, the better off we are. In reality, when decision-makers are inundated with extraneous reports, they may miss valuable messages that they need to see. What goals is your division working towards? Which pieces of data most closely track progress to these goals? The best way to guide a strategic process for looking at data aligns your business goals with a limited number of key metrics to indicate when changes are needed to reset course. 

3.      Identify a data “expert” on your team. Given the issues that exist in every organization with data quality, it is valuable to identify someone who is intimately aware of the source and limitations of the data your company assesses. This person can answer questions on why particular data might be wrong, if duplicate records are skewing the data, or how outliers are affecting results. Your data expert can help to tell the story of your organization’s data to better frame what actions are needed to meet your operating goals.

Using data to make better business decisions does not need to be cost-prohibitive. Before investing in any data and analytics tools, implement these best practices to lay the groundwork for a sound approach to using the data you already have. They can be used by any company, regardless of size or budget. And the best part is, you can start to use these best practices today.

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Bob Selle has led culture change and organizational design for America’s most recognized retailers. He is currently the Chief Human Resource Officer for the northeast’s premier close-out store Ocean State Job Lot, leading a transformation that has named them a Forbes Best Midsize Employer two years in a row.

Shannon Shallcross is a data expert who believes that data interpretation holds the key to solving healthcare’s toughest challenges. As the co-founder and CEO of BetaXAnalytics, her company uses the power of data “for good” to improve the cost, transparency and quality of healthcare for employers.

See Bob and Shannon at the Strategic HR Mt. Washington Conference on October 29th, 2018 during their plenary session, Metrics That Matter: Let Numbers Tell a Story.