Business Group on Health CEO discusses the pros and cons of the telehealth explosion

Employers have the power to shape the future of employee benefits, if they’re willing to push for more innovative and cutting edge solutions from their partners.

Ellen Kelsay, president and CEO of Business Group on Health, says employers need to ask the tough questions, and respond, rather than react, to the myriad of virtual health solutions that have flooded the market during COVID.

“I think that employers have tremendous agency to significantly drive and improve healthcare services and delivery in the United States,” Kelsay says. “Now that we’re hopefully coming out of the pandemic, employers need solutions that integrate and partner with other solutions in their ecosystem and make sure they’re committed to improving the outcomes of their population.”

Read more: How to help employers prioritize benefits offerings

Leading Business Group on Health since May, 2020, Kelsay says she’s seen employers look for every possible well-being solution to best serve their workforce. The nonprofit is working to hold providers accountable for health outcomes, and ensure the solutions available to employers are high quality and cost-effective. She shares what employers should know and how employee benefits have changed in a recent conversation with Employee Benefit News. 

You began your tenure in the thick of the pandemic — what was it like to lead your organization through those tough times? 
I was fortunate because I was not new to the organization; I was here for three years prior as the chief strategy officer. I was familiar with the team, our work, the members, and we had a very well coordinated succession plan. So when the pandemic actually came upon us and I officially stepped into the role, I already had my feet on the ground.

But even with all of those advantages, just like any other leader during that time, it was managing through an immense amount of uncertainty for all of us on a personal level, for all of us professionally, and then for me as a new leader, trying to support the team and also to support our members during that time was quite an interesting transition. I feel like we pivoted in all the right ways, but certainly it was and still continues to be a wild ride for all of us.

Hopefully we’re turning a corner on COVID, but what are some of the challenges you're still navigating as a leader and helping your employer partners overcome? 

I'm an optimist, but I do think it's hard for everybody right now. I think people often think about staying the course and business as usual and what they can do to make sure that their businesses continue to thrive and evolve, but you have unbelievable pressures on the workforce, and if you think about people, first and foremost, it’s been hard to deal with the uncertainty.

Then when you think about our work with health and well-being, it’s astronomically expanded in the last two years. There’s mental health, virtual health, health equity, the many aspects of leave and caregiving support. The work has certainly gotten more robust and expansive, which has been harder but also so much more fulfilling. I feel this sense of privilege and responsibility to do well on behalf of the people that we serve organizationally, which are our member companies and their employees, but also whom I serve internally, which is my team and my employees.

What are some of the ways Business Group on Health is serving those communities and helping address well-being challenges? 
I’ll start with mental health, which isn’t new, but the pandemic magnified it considerably. You can definitely say that for the past two to three years, every single one of us at one point has been depressed. We've been stressed. We've been burned out. We've seen some isolation and loss of connection and community for others. There are more significant issues like substance use disorder and suicide ideation. So everything under the sun in that spectrum has touched every single one of us, probably in different ways. For us, mental health was not a new priority, but how do we expand our reach and our influence and have a greater impact? We want to drive and influence other stakeholders who maybe themselves can directly affect change. So we did a ton of programming with webinars and held a virtual summit on mental health.

Read more: Combating depression and suicidal thoughts through telehealth

We’re also talking to health plans about having enough providers, and virtual health solutions about having high-quality physicians and clinicians and therapists. My concern is that two or three years from now, we may have a reckoning to deal with related to all of these very well-intended, much needed access points of virtual care. We’re starting to look into, what are your outcomes? What quality standards do you hold your solution and your providers to? Are you improving costs or are you creating unnecessary services that eventually a person will have to go to their doctor for anyway? We’re asking these hard questions to get ahead of this issue down the road.

There are just so many options now for employers to choose from. How can they make sure the benefits they add are in the best interest of their business and their employees? 
It wasn't that long ago that most health and well-being things were pretty much carved in through the health plan. So if you had a Blue Cross Blue Shield plan, most of the services you needed were offered through the employer Blue Cross offering, and maybe one or two things were carved out to a specialty vendor. But because there were emerging needs over time, you had more and more things being carved out. You could have everything from diabetes to cardiology to musculoskeletal solutions, and it got to the point where employers went from having two or three partners, to having 30 partners. And none of them were sharing data with one another, and their employees couldn’t navigate 30 different solutions.

So the pendulum started to swing back pre-pandemic, of employers starting to say, we need to rationalize the number of partners and solutions we have. Then the pandemic hit and everything went in the other direction, again, of adding more solutions in. Now that we’re hopefully coming out of the pandemic, employers are needing to moderate the number of people they partner with and are looking for solutions and partners that aren’t just one and done. They want those solutions to integrate and partner with other solutions in their ecosystem. Then it's the questions around quality and outcome, right? Are you in this for the long-term? They really want to make sure that the solutions and founders are committed to improving outcomes of the population.

Read more: How this telehealth app is establishing lasting relationships between doctors and patients

What trends are you anticipating in the health and well-being space as employers look to simplify, while still responding to what employees are asking for? 
I think that employers have tremendous agency to improve health and delivery services in the United States. They are the largest payer of healthcare services in the United States. They can ask more of partners, more of health plans, more of health systems, more of prescription drug manufacturers to be more innovative and to do things that are fundamentally improving overall healthcare cost and quality and patient outcomes and satisfaction. My hope is that we see this activism and a vocal approach that employers can take toward accountability for themselves, but also to their partners, to really use this pandemic as a springboard to course correct and address some long standing issues that we've had with health and well-being in this country.

I think you will see employers continue to be unbelievably flexible and empathetic in supporting their workforce from every perspective. We know that human resource leaders and benefits leaders understood how important that was, but because of the pandemic, every C-suite executive now truly realizes how directly correlated the health and well-being of their workforces are to their business. You need to continue to invest in programs to support your workforce from every perspective. From traditional health and health insurance, to physical health, mental health, financial health, job satisfaction and their community and social interactions, there’s a lot of promise for the future in terms of what employers are going to be focused on when supporting the workforce.