By Randy Van Straten, Vice President, Business & Community Health, Bellin Health
The key to justifying an occupational medicine program to your C-Suites is simple. Helping employers with an occupational health program is just plain, good business for health systems. How do you go about the tough sell? This starts with working with your own health system as an occupational health employer customer, producing results, and demonstrating bottom-line value directly to the health system; this is called starting in the walls. The next step is to move beyond the walls to your community employers, creating a durable competitive advantage in the marketplace establishing a market channel advantage for the health system. Finally, putting this all together will create a thriving community that helps grow the economic base of the community as well as the population of employed commercially insured lives. Doing so brings the effort full circle and helps your health system prosper.
Starting in the walls of your own health system allows your program to create its own story and align with the needs of the health system to produce results. Start with taking a deeper look at the opportunities with traditional occupational health services of pre-employment exams. Pre-employment exams are a great way to help align your new employees with a primary care provider in your health system.
By aligning them with primary care and even an initial appointment can help reduce gaps in care for your own covered lives. This can be easily measured and reported out as helping grow aligned lives for the health system and supporting a healthier workforce.
As an occupational health program goes beyond the walls of the health system with onsite services, it is very important to collectively track the downstream revenue from each employer individually and as an aggregate. The expectation is the revenue growth and aligned lives with primary care will be double the health system’s typical growth rate. For example, if the health system grows at 4%, the expectation is 8%. Each life then is counted as an average revenue value of $2,700 with a 20% profit margin, so each life contributes $540 to the bottom line. This is a powerful way to show the value of working directly with employers to embed the health system.
How does this translate to a thriving community? Helping employers create healthier employees, lower costs, and an improved experience will drive more hiring and growth for your employer base. In our market, 63% of the population receives their health care through an employer health plan. This is the largest demographic in most community markets and the most profitable to work with. Creating thriving communities through working with employers can be measured by creating anemployer relationship factor score for your community.
This is accomplished by measuring the breadth and depth of your business with employers with a weighted scoring methodology. Each company is given a weighted point and scored at the highest level for the defined relationship with the level of occupational health services provided. We call this our Total Health Engagement Venturi and display this as a funnel of increasing business for the health system for a durable competitive advantage (Figure 1).
Here is an example of the point scoring: Corporate Wellbeing Program – 1 point, Employer Services Program – 2 points, Contracted Onsite Services – 3 points, and Strategic Partner Risk Agreements – 4 points. These numbers are added up for an aggregate score and reported to the health system.
Another example is to list all the logos of the companies magnetically on boards as the example illustrates (Figure 2). What you typically find is the greater the depth of the relationship, the better the results are for the employer and the health system. Companies using your services grow faster in the community.
An occupational medicine program just makes good business sense. Within your health system’s walls, you can build a program that aligns with your mission, improves the health and wellness of your workforce, reduces workplace injury, increases productivity, reduces medical claims costs and legal risks – all directly impacting your bottom line. These results can be shared as an example within your employer community, and you can help them embed onsite services and programs beyond your walls into theirs, helping them improve health costs while improving the health, productivity, and retention of their
workforce. As a preferred provider in their health care plan, it will be hard for them to move to another health system for these services when your health system is such a value-added partner to them.
That’s a market channel advantage. Finally, healthy employees, prospering employers, and stronger bottom-lines add to the viability of any community to allow for future growth leading to more community members to join your workforce or enter your health system’s doors for health care as an employee of another community employer. Helping your health system and community employers with an occupational health program is just plain, good business for health systems and the communities around them!
