ibi’s th partnership with - integrated benefits institute...1. this is ibi’s 19th member...
TRANSCRIPT
1. This is IBI’s 19th member conference – sometimes held in partnership with
other organizations and sometimes held on our own. After 10 years of
conference partnerships – 5 with NBGH and 5 with NBCH – we are going
forward with an IBI‐hosted conference. 10 years ago, we had fewer than
200 members; today we have close to 950, including 850 ER organizations.
2. In each annual Forum, we have presented a recent IBI research study on
one aspect of health and productivity management.
3. This past year, IBI published 15 original research reports and analyses – 7
of which have been submitted to peer‐reviewed journals and 4 of which
have been published or accepted for publication, thus far.
4. So rather than focus on a single study from this body of work, I thought it
might be a good time to step back and ask “What does the research
evidence tell us to date about health and productivity, and what’s next?”
5. So I’ll provide an overview of how – at least in my view – ERs got to this
point and what’s on the horizon.
6. We’ll follow that with a distinguished panel to discuss these issues.
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1. ERs have spent the past year focusing on tactical responses to the ACA –
particularly around healthcare financing and coverage. As they go
forward, the focus necessarily will expand to strategy around workforce
health and what it means to their companies. And those strategies
undoubtedly will include developing strategies for workplace wellness
programs and approaches to he creation of healthy workplaces.
2. These changes will occur for two key reasons: First, CFOs are now asking
about the value of investing in health and not just the cost of healthcare.
Second, it has been amply demonstrated that managing claims in separate
program silos is no strategy for managing the overall health of a working
population and all of its attendant costs.
3. And as ERs face these new realities, they always remind us that they have
limited data, time and dollars to make this transition.
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1. Let me spend a few minutes talking about how the approach to
“managing health” has evolved.
2. It seems to me that the path has gone something like this:
a. Treat healthcare as a cost of doing business
b. Change plan designs to try to control healthcare costs
c. Narrow the focus to managing high‐cost claims
d. Try to get in front of costs by managing health risks
e. Recognize the limitations of a medical‐cost‐only focus and include broader outcomes
f. Then figure out what’s next
3. Let’s explore this progression for a few minutes because it helps set the
framework for the discussion of what’s next.
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1. It wasn’t really all that long ago that providing healthcare was simply a
cost of doing business. As healthcare costs grew, the value – and perhaps
the rationale – for providing health coverage tended to focus on attraction
and retention of key employees.
2. And as long as costs were not a “significant” part of operating expenses, it
pretty much stayed that way. A great example is the case study we did
with MGM Mirage several years ago. As long as the trend in revenue
growth was greater than the growth in healthcare costs, healthcare was
not a significant economic issue to the company. But when those trends
flipped, healthcare became a crisis almost overnight.
3. So, as medical cost growth becomes untenable, ERs often turned to plan
design changes as a way to ameliorate their cost burden of health (slide).
4. The result of these strategies, however, often shifted costs to EEs. But as
long as the shifts stayed within what appeared to be reasonable – and did
not threaten attraction and retention goal – ERs saw little reason to
change.
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1. However, as ERs and their partners began to examine claims data, they
recognized that a relatively small number of claims was driving an
inordinate share of costs – that is, the pareto group of claimants.
2. So ERs turned to disease management programs as a way to get control of
the costs of chronic conditions. And disease management, for the most
part, has been effective in achieving that goal, even as ERs are challenged
with implementing ROI analyses. Many of you, I’m sure, have seen the
most recent RAND report addressing the topic.
3. But the limitation of this approach, of course, was the very nature of
disease management – it tended to focus on a relatively small number of
people with serious chronic health conditions. So the strategy essentially
managed costs on the “back end” and did little for the remaining EEs that
were healthy or low‐cost claimants ‐‐ or for EEs who were not provided
health benefits at all. That is, it ignored the health of the large proportion
of EEs driving business performance for the company.
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1. Thus, the disease management strategy was insufficient to manage the
health of an entire population of EEs.
2. The logical question for ERs therefore became: “How can we get on the
front‐end of the health cost issue?”
3. Led by several leading researchers – including one of our panelists today,
Dr. Wayne Burton – ERs began to look carefully at how health risks
impacted costs and affected the development of health conditions.
4. The population health management perspective began to emerge.
5. Many ERs have been late to adopt this approach – particularly those
without full‐time, long‐tenured EEs.
6. And amidst this broadening of focus, there have complicating factors in
the ER setting: the changing nature of work in many organizations, along
with an increases in the proportion of part‐time, un‐benefitted jobs –
particularly in the construction and retail sectors.
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1. One of the “gestalts” in the development of population health has been
the recognition that it is hard to save medical dollars by spending medical
dollars, particularly in the shorter term. Wellness programs are under
close scrutiny on this issue.
2. So inevitably, the next question was: “What are all the outcomes of better
health beyond healthcare costs .. and this took us right into lost time,
health‐related job performance (or presenteeism) and productivity.
3. So this is what the full model of health and productivity now
encompasses: leading indicators of health on the left side of the equation,
indicators of care in the middle and lagging – or outcome ‐‐ indicators on
the right.
4. So, to what degree is this model of health and productivity supported by
rigorous research and analysis?
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1. If you have ever had the occasion to search on the term “health and
productivity” or related topics in a research search engine such as
PubMed, you’ll find a listing of literally thousands of scholarly articles.
2. In fact, for this presentation we reviewed 156 relevant studies published
since 1990 that each has been cited at least 100 times in the peer
reviewed literature – and together more than 38,000 times. (And we’d be
happy to share this research listing with anyone interested). One of the
primary purposes of the IBI Knowledge Bank on our new website is to
bring together peer‐reviewed literature for our members.
3. So, attempting to summarize all of this research in a short presentation
clearly is a fool’s errand. Perhaps a better question to address today is,
“What themes are supported by the research that now drives both the
scientific and the business conversation about health and productivity ?
4. As we see it, there are 4 key broad themes that dominate the research
literature (read).
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1. So now that we’ve highlighted what this body of research evidence tells
us, it is now time to ask: “What doesn’t it tell us?”
2. Research to date tell us a great deal about all the costs associated with
health and about their antecedents. Even the way research tends to
address lost productivity is cost‐based: the opportunity costs of lost work
time, whether from absence or from presenteeism.
3. But, thus far it tells us little about the impact on top‐line business
performance – how healthier employees may impact business results.
There is no doubt CFOs care about costs and the bottom line; there also is
no doubt that they are intensely interested in strategies to grow top‐line
revenue.
4. And as soon as we get into this conversation, we must expand our model
beyond the traditional HPM relationships we show here in the blue boxes.
5. So the question ultimately needs to be: how does a broader set of factors,
together with this “traditional model,” influence population health and
business performance. Such factors likely include health behaviors and
engagement, corporate culture and structure, and employee well being.
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This takes us an important step closer to a health and human
capital model of business performance.
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1. Within this broader framework, IBI researchers have a diverse set of research
projects slated for 2014.
2. IBI studies will include the longitudinal impacts of health risk change on costs,
lost time and performance ‐‐ so we can see actually what happens to individuals
and their outcomes as their health changes over time. Within this framework,
we also will examine the impact of medication adherence and gaps in medical
care.
3. We’re now undertaking research to improve measurement of performance and
its business impacts. If there are ERs interested in participating in that research,
see IBI Research Director Dr. Kimberly Jinnett.
4. We will address the broader issues as well – with a particular focus on hard‐to‐
reach/difficult to engage EEs – initially through case studies & webinars with
ERs that are “pushing the envelope” as a precursor to more extensive research.
There is much to learn from the ER experience to crystallize these new areas.
5. We’re now working to undertake studies with employers on leave patterns in
call centers, on linkages between benefits & risk management and on new data
strategies for collecting and using population health metrics.
6. Finally, we have recently set up a 501‐C3 research unit – The Center for
Workforce Health and Performance – within IBI to access broader research
funding sources, particularly government and foundation grants.
7. The field has come a long way since we started IBI nearly 19 years ago … and
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there’s still a long way to go. There is no doubt that the people
in this room will be an important part of that future. We at IBI
plan to be a part of it as well. Thank you very much.
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