The corporate healthcare market is looking a bit peaky, but with a bit of goodwill it is sustainable, writes Elliott Hurst.
Preventative measures
A key development in the quest to manage staff healthcare costs more effectively is the growing awareness of the importance of prevention.
Traditionally, the role of private medical insurance and other health related benefits have been to pick the problem up once it has manifested itself.
This core need remains fulfilled by the benefit programme. However, the threat to performance and productivity posed by the increasing prevalence of lifestyle-related illness is too important to overlook.
Increasingly, insurers are turning their hand to offering corporate clients prevention and wellbeing services to both complement and complete their workplace health management strategies.
Simply offering employees access to health education material to increase their awareness and understanding of personal health risks is only a start.
A growing number of employers are introducing coherent, targeted wellbeing strategies to manage employee health risks and, in turn, improve productivity.
For wellbeing strategies to be effective, employers need to have clear objectives and the capability to implement a well-designed programme.
For example, where psychological health risks are high, programmes to improve corporate health might commonly focus on resilience and stress management training, including structured support and education for people managers who are often at the sharp end when it comes to dealing with staff affected by such problems.
Where obesity and hypertension are a concern, health assessments, support to improve diet and encourage or reward exercise, either on an individual or group basis, may well be more appropriate.
With the arrival of engaging, e-enabled personal health risk management tools, ready access to these resources is becoming a cost-effective reality.
Employers are investing in online health platforms to act as a hub to bring such services together, as well as to provide actionable management information, which is critical for evaluation of programme effectiveness and for shaping future planning.
Prevention notwithstanding, employees will inevitably become ill or injured from time to time. Also integral to corporate healthcare sustainability is active case management of such employees throughout their treatment and recovery phases.
This is an area where employers, insurers and providers can work together to devise effective return-to-work plans (a vastly superior approach to simply allowing employees to drift into what may become an unnecessarily lengthy and costly spell of sickness absence).
Good communication is critical to success and, when introducing better approaches to managing healthcare costs, it is important that they are explained to staff in a way that enhances their perceived value. Introduction of pro-active, pro-health measures should help achieve this.
Another key strand to maintaining corporate healthcare sustainability is medical insurers’ use of preferred healthcare providers. It is an approach that enables insurers to balance the need to provide clients with the right level of coverage and accessibility with the financial benefits that arise from selected healthcare providers receiving a guaranteed volume of business.
Of course, insurers must also be mindful to continue to offer clients flexibility. Employer flexible benefit programmes increasingly offer employees the opportunity to buy up to a level of health benefits over and above that provided as core by their employer.
Increasingly, corporate healthcare scheme members are accessing the services of preferred providers via an open referral route, where their GPs indicate that they need a consultation but without referring them to a specific, named specialist.
This approach, which has been common in the NHS for some years now, allows insurers to offer members a choice of suitable consultants whose fees they can guarantee will be covered in full.
