How Much Do Employees Value Healthcare?

The mission of Captiva is to partner with your business to make purchasing benefits for your employees more affordable — and to make those benefits more effective for everyone involved. That means an approach that forgoes the status quo, using new business models and new methods in order to provide a benefit process that is the best case scenario for everyone involved.

With the costs of healthcare perpetually on the rise, there might be a temptation to forgo offering health benefits to employees at all. Unfortunately, many smaller businesses take that route.

However, that choice can cause real and lasting damage to both your employees’ satisfaction-- and your ability to hire employees to begin with.

According to a poll taken last year by Glassdoor, one of the leading job search services in the United States, benefits rank only barely below salary on the list of job seekers’ priorities. And a crucial part of any benefits package is the healthcare portion.

The reasoning isn’t hard to understand: no matter how good your salary is, a medical disaster can eat it up in a matter of days if you’re uninsured or underinsured. As a result, a lot of career advice is centered around the question of balancing a salary offer and a benefits package when choosing from a list of potential job offers.

Once you’ve attracted quality applicants to your business and hired them, ideally you’ll want to keep them there. Employee retention is a crucial part of any company strategy, as having employees stick around for longer often means that profits stay consistently higher. Having personnel continuity lends itself to more employee satisfaction and a smoother workflow.

According to a 2018 survey, the quality of the healthcare benefits are a significant factor in why more than half of employees stay at a given job. Their overall satisfaction was driven by the type of coverage, cost and how much control of options they had. But the number one reason for dissatisfaction? Cost.

Even if your employees don’t actually leave the company, the anxiety, stress and dissatisfaction of having inadequate healthcare is likely to impact workplace morale, which in turn reduces productivity.

Employees who do not feel like they are able to get health issues cared for before they progress to something extreme may ultimately find themselves facing costly bills and crises that make them unable to come into work for days or weeks at a time.

It’s clear that the cost of not having affordable, adequate healthcare benefits offered to your employees is real — both for the overall health of your company, and for every individual who is a part of it.

At Captiva, we can help you connect your benefit needs to solutions that will keep costs down and deliver effective care to your employees.

If you’re ready to get started implementing a system that will allow you to offer more for less spend, attract more skilled employees and keep them longer and confidently navigate a chaotic healthcare landscape, give us a call!

How Much Do Employees Value Healthcare? is courtesy of: www.captivabenefitsolutions.com

How to Beat the Pharmaceutical System

We’ve spent some time talking before about how legislation is developing to challenge out-of-control pharmaceutical pricing.

Developing that legislation is likely to be one of the key bipartisan meeting places at a time where one party holds the Senate majority and another holds the House. 

20-25% of most employers’ healthcare expenditures go to pharmaceuticals. As we’ve explained in the past, part of this is due to PBMs (Pharmacy Benefit Managers) incentivizing higher drug spends.

An oft-cited case study for this problem are diabetes treatments like Metformin and insulin. The price of insulin has more than doubled within five years — and many professionals believe that PBMs are to blame.

When it comes to insulin, the price point can be a matter of life and death. More and more stories are emerging about diabetic patients turning to black market sources or else attempting to ration their insulin, which often results in death.

Metformin, another primary treatment for blood sugar in diabetics, has also seen a dramatic increase. 

This obviously dire situation has quickly attracted the attention of lawmakers, who aim to prevent manufacturers and PBMs from continuing to drive up the prices. But for health benefit providers who are trying to cover the cost of their members’ vital prescriptions now, the legislative process can feel dangerously slow.

What can you do to protect your employees from those kinds of harrowing choices? Captiva and other companies adhering to the Health Rosetta are working to do exactly that by holding their partners accountable to a standard of transparency.

This model works by only partnering with PBMs who are willing to allow full access to the pricing data, accepting that purchasers have the freedom to use that data to shop around for the best possible prices. Better PBM contracts have been proven to reduce pharmaceutical spends by 5-10%.

Captiva partners with you in the process, helping you assess the available information in order to find the best possible price.

Captiva also assists in helping you understand and navigate the many moving parts of the pharmaceutical industry and PBMs, demystifying a notoriously opaque system. Understanding the forces that are driving drug prices up helps you circumvent the system — and pass those savings on to your employees in the form of life-saving necessities.

If you’re ready to find out more about how we can push back against the skyrocketing pharmaceutical prices together, give us a call.

How to Beat the Pharmaceutical System was first seen on: https://captivabenefitsolutions.com

How Concierge Style Care Breaks Open Healthcare Silos

One of the most frustrating parts of the healthcare experience for any patient seeking treatment is simply knowing where to get started.

There is a massive amount of information out there about hospitals, doctors and the services they offer, and sifting through it and establishing how to connect different services can be daunting.

Making an on-the-fly decision about where to start based on the symptoms you’re experiencing can be difficult, even impossible. This can ultimately cause further health complications as conditions go untreated and unchecked due to the inadequacy of the system in place.

This is the kind of scenario that you as an an employer want to prevent for your employees. We’ve explained how concierge style customer service in healthcare can do exactly that.

Let’s take a deeper look at how this type of care specifically combats healthcare information silos.

When we refer to care being in silos, what that means is that data is often stored in independent units, or “silos,” of information. Doctors don’t always talk to a patient’s other doctors and specialists. Hospitals don’t always communicate with other hospitals.

Picture each care provider as a towering, walled-in grain silo, holding granules of information that never travel from their container to any other nearby silos.

Healthcare silos have created a massive problem for patients to receive the care they need. Without specialists communicating well, tests are often repeated or symptoms are missed — causing frustrating delays.

Treatment can involved dozens of different healthcare professionals, and with the current standard model, those professionals are making decisions based on only partial information about the patient.

Even patients themselves might not have access to the best information about their own care to begin with, as we mentioned above.

Beyond the individual picture, healthcare as a whole suffers from the lack of information sharing. With access to fuller descriptions of cases, doctors could more quickly diagnose patients.

Often when assessing a complex situation, it’s not that data regarding prior case studies doesn’t exist for doctors to study. It’s simply that healthcare is structured so they do not have access to it.

Sometimes breaking down a systemic issue can start on the level of one patient at a time, and concierge style care is doing exactly that.

This concept encompasses a model where patients have access to information distilled down and personalized for them. It means direct relationships with care providers operating within a network streamlined to include the most important and effective care to patients.

Although concierge care has been offered by individual hospitals or doctors to patients, usually that kind of care is very costly and requires additional insurance for catastrophic scenarios.

In order to make concierge medicine both effective and affordable, Captiva’s model invites benefit providers to combine the concept of concierge care with reference-based pricing and the full support of the rest of the Health Rosetta components.

This approach keeps the cost down while still allowing for all the benefits of direct relationships between patients and their care team. This tight and transparent relationship between patient, doctors and benefit providers breaks down the information silos, creating clear communication.

If you want to understand more about how our model of care can help both your employees and their doctors make more informed decisions, we’re happy to answer your questions.

How Concierge Style Care Breaks Open Healthcare Silos was originally seen on: https://captivabenefitsolutions.com

Could 2019 Be the Year of Transparency?

We’ve been talking about the importance of transparency at Captiva for a long time.

Over the past few months, the rest of the country seems to have caught up, as new legislation requiring chargemasters to be posted publicly went into effect at the start of the year. The legislation is part of a snowballing bipartisan conversation on better legislation to encourage healthcare transparency.

Back in November, Gary Kaplan (CEO of Virginia Mason Health System) shared in an editorial for Harvard Business Review:

“I believe it is impossible to have complete transparency with patients without first developing a strong culture of internal transparency — among all team members, at all levels, on all issues — throughout the health care organization itself.”

Kaplan continues to unpack the ways that transparency is important not just for pricing effectiveness, but also for safety.

A culture of secrecy in healthcare often enables the same mistakes to keep happening, over and over, rather than being brought to light and fixed.

He concluded:

“In the United States, we have more information than ever about how to provide appropriate, high-quality care and keep patients safe. Transparency with internal and external stakeholders is essential for quality, safety, accountability, and informed decision making.”

Washington shares Kaplan’s perspective. So far, 2019 has held bipartisan efforts to address drug pricing transparency. 

Several members of Congress selected guests for the State of the Union address who were victims of balance billing (surprise medical bills when insurance doesn’t cover what a patient expects) or drug price disputes.

The conversation is going all the way to the top, with President Trump himself committing to end the often devastating impact of surprise medical bills. 

The question that more and more hospitals and healthcare providers are beginning to ask is how the big picture of new legislation will trickle down.

The chargemasters that the government required to be made public earlier this year are, as we discussed, not actually a great point of reference for what the cost of care will actually be. Some hospital CIOs are addressing the problem by also implementing cost estimators for patients to use. This allows consumers to have a better sense of what to expect heading into a hospital visit.

Those small changes are going to save patients and benefit providers like you big money. A recent study out of the University of Michigan revealed that when New Hampshire launched a healthcare pricing transparency website, consumers saved 5% and benefit providers saved 4%.

That was just one small effort in one state, with the results tracked over a 5 years period. Longterm, with more widespread measures introduced, those savings could be even higher.

What all of this means is that the time for benefit models like the one Captiva has built has finally come.

2019 might be the year when we see transparency championed not just in providers following the Health Rosetta, but all over the country.

If you’re ready to get started now in bringing this level of transparency to your employees’ healthcare, we stand at the ready. Let's talk.

Could 2019 Be the Year of Transparency? was first seen on: Captiva Benefit Solutions Healthcare Blog

Healthcare Job Increase Signals A Need For Efficient Care

As the 2018 year-end reflections turn towards 2019 predictions, one consistent theme is clear: the healthcare job market is growing, and it shows no signs of slowing down any time soon. 

Healthcare created a lot of new jobs in 2018 — 346,000 of them, to be specific. And the projection is for that growth to continue, with the Center for Health Workforce predicting a 20% increase in health care jobs from 2016 to 2026.

By the end of 2018, nearly 11% of the American workforce was employed in healthcare jobs. Additionally, 6 of the 8 fastest growing jobs overall are healthcare related.

We could share even more statistics, but suffice to say very few other fields are growing at that extreme pace. This naturally leads us to ask questions about why.

One simple reason is that the average age of American citizens is simply skewing older. With an older population, the need for medical services increases. Supply always rises to meet demand, and it’s clear that the demand will continue to rise with the median age of U.S. inhabitants.  

Another likely cause of increase is that under the Affordable Care Act, more people are insured, meaning more people have the freedom to seek care.

As you’d expect, this increase in demand poses challenges for hospitals. Some of the highly needed positions include pharmacy technicians, nurse practitioners, registered nurses and additional non-clinical jobs like medical secretary and medical coding technician.

The needs on display certainly include basic care, but also show the struggle to keep up with processing data effectively. There continues to be a chronic shortage of practitioners in some fields, notably in primary care.

The fact that healthcare jobs are needed faster than they can be filled proves that efficiency is more important now than ever.

Connecting patients to the care that they need, from the practitioners best equipped to deliver it, cuts back on how often patients hop between doctors and hospitals. Centering the primary care provider in a patient’s care plan saves time and money for everyone involved — and ensures that no patient is left behind due to growing pains of the healthcare system. 

By empowering you as an employer to have a direct health benefits relationship with your employers and a direct financial relationship with top notch care providers, Captiva helps you make sure that the process is streamlined. Your employees get the care they need, without the headache of sifting through endless data in a rapidly expanding list of options.

Ultimately, this system promises to improve the healthcare landscape as a whole by creating long-term patient and provider relationships that solve the high turnover rates currently plaguing many healthcare positions.

Are you ready to be part of this revolution? Contact us to get started!

Healthcare Job Increase Signals A Need For Efficient Care is courtesy of: Captiva Benefit

Blockchain Is Changing How We Think About Healthcare Data

We’ve already spent some time the past few months talking about how data is a hot button conversation topic in the healthcare world. One of the most sobering studies last year revealed how much healthcare data is being leaked.

2019 has started with assessing how the inaccurate patient matching system can be improved. Now, the news has broken that some major players in the healthcare industry are utilizing blockchain technology to address some of the issues we’ve been covering.

Blockchain is a information storage system that was developed to support cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. The technology works in a structure that allows data to be collected, stored in chronological order and accessed in a more effective and secure way than past digital models. If you want to understand a little bit more about how the technology works, Blockgeeks has a walkthrough.

The news broke this week that health insurance network Aetna, provider Anthem and Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC) are partnering with computer hardware company IBM and PNC Bank to apply blockchain to healthcare. This effort is being propelled forward by a collaborative effort called the Synaptic Health Alliance.

According to the Alliance’s white paper, “The Alliance views blockchain technology as a means to a critical end: ensuring that data is accurate and sharable for reliable use across the healthcare ecosystem. Thanks to the members' large collective data volume and national footprint, this collaboration could prove the business value of cross-company data sharing in healthcare and, ultimately, help facilitate a significant positive impact in the healthcare market space.”

In a statement about joining the initiative, Aetna chief technology officer Claus Jensen said “Through the application of blockchain technology, we'll work to improve data accuracy for providers, regulators, and other stakeholders, and give our members more control over their own data.”

It’s easy to see why some of these industry giants would find this technology attractive. With its streamlined and accurate model, blockchain could help solve some of the ongoing data problems that major healthcare corporations struggle with.

The core issues they’re trying to solve are accuracy and security of data stored. Of course, at Captiva we’ve already been solving those problems with the model established by the Health Rosetta. 

By fostering direct relationships between benefit providers and caregivers, the patient data storage system is personalized. Sensitive information isn’t shared between near as many parties, centralizing care.

Sustained relationships between those paying for benefits and the hospitals treating the benefit recipients makes communication clear and smooth. The transparent relationships at all levels result in a higher level of trust. Whatever data storage advances are made through blockchain will be just amplified in effectiveness when they reach the care providers that your business will interact with.

As blockchain transforms how the healthcare industry thinks about data, Captiva continues to help your business stay a step ahead in providing benefits for employees. Contact us today to find your solutions!

The following article Blockchain Is Changing How We Think About Healthcare Data is republished from: https://www.captivabenefitsolutions.com/

Solving the Patient Matching Problem

One of the early stories in healthcare news for 2019 revolved around the question of patient matching. The Government Accountability Office released a report revealing that two base-level problems continue to make matching difficult: records corresponding to the wrong patient are often matched, and multiple existing records for the same patient are not matched.

The report took into account interviews with a wide range of providers and vendors. The conversation centered in part around what standards would effectively make a dent in the problem. Many ideas focus on the concept of standardizing the systems for collecting healthcare-related data.

This is one of the essential flaws that the Health Rosetta paradigm has already been seeking to fix — and at Captiva Benefit Solutions, we’ve been helping businesses use their model to effectively create change.

First, it’s important to understand what exactly this efficiency problem is costing us.

The reality is that in a lot of companies, 6% of the employees are spending 80% of the health benefit plan dollars. Those employees are those with complex, usually chronic health challenges, needing specialist care. These patients are often referred to as “outliers” within the medical system.

With complex health problems, usually multiple specialists are involved. With poor patient matching and scattered models of care, often those specialists are not in communication and cannot access all of the data on an outlier’s needs. This leads to an abundance of procedures and tests that actually were not necessary.

For example, some studies show that as many of 40% of transplants are unnecessary. Some patients are receiving transplants where they are not needed, while others are on endless waiting lists due to short supply caused by poor communication.

The cost is clear: expensive procedures that eat up plan dollars plus a significant cost in time and suffering for patients.  

The Health Rosetta solution is to hone in on a network of confirmed, credible care providers, removing hospitals that are unlikely to be a good fit from the equation.

Often, this involves developing direct contracts with "centers of excellence" that are able to serve as referral centers, offering second opinions and connecting patients with the highest quality specialists.

Narrowing the field of options for all patients, including outliers, makes it significantly easier for the right data to get to the right person. Another way that patient matching process is streamlined is through placing the primary care physician as the central hub of anyone’s care.

These direct relationships between care providers and benefit providers cut out the middlemen and clearly define a path for moving through the appropriate care plan for even the most complex cases.

The return on your investment as a provider of benefits becomes significantly higher.

With higher quality care provided at a lower cost to everyone involved, it’s clear to see why the Health Rosetta’s model is already solving the healthcare problems the news is talking about.

Find out more about our approach to saving you and your employees money on benefits!

Solving the Patient Matching Problem is available on: Captiva Benefit