It's time to get more intentional about employee healthcare

• Key insight: Discover how steering employees to top-performing providers reduces costs while improving care quality.
• Expert quote: Incentivize high-performing providers to lower employee out-of-pocket costs, says Harrison Newman, VP, Corporate Synergies.
• Forward look: Expect benefits designs increasingly tied to provider performance and strategic cost control.
• Source: Bullets generated by AI with editorial review

Rising healthcare costs are a challenge for businesses and individuals. Employers and employees will have to do more legwork to find high-quality, more cost-effective providers, but this strategy is a win-win.   

Benefit leaders can incentivize employees by offering lower copays and deductibles for services provided by top-performing providers. Employer-supplied benefit tools, often found on insurer's websites, offer up providers who meet high-performance and cost-efficient criteria, says Harrison Newman, VP and benefits consultant at Corporate Synergies. This might include high success rates, providers who prescribe generic prescriptions over name brand, or those that are specialty-specific to save costs.  

"You're pushing [employees] to be cost effective," he says. "For example, if they go to a specialist [from the list], their co-pay drops from $80 to $40. So they have the option to go wherever they want and spend the $80, but if they go to a high performance doctor, they're lowering their out of pocket." 

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Employers have a lot to gain from setting employees up with this more intentional approach, too. Their workforce potentially receives higher-quality care, and costs become more stabilized. 

"[Let's say] we have a good year on our benefits plan and we want to enhance our benefits," Newman says. "Instead of just enhancing them and making it a $40 copay or a $20 copay or a $0 copay, we're going to say, 'We're going to give you that $0 copay, but only if you go to a high-performance provider or a specialty provider who we know is going to control the cost. 

It's still offering those rich benefits, but it's doing it strategically."

Worth the work

People aren't always eager to change from their current provider to a new one. Convincing them to do this requires a balancing act of a strategic benefit itself, along with thoughtful communication and education about why this is a positive change, says Newman. 

"Education [helps] make sure that when you're doing something right, employees understand what it is and that you're doing it for their benefit, because the average layman doesn't understand insurance," he says. "Employees want this to be easy. Their thought process is, 'I need to go to the doctor and I want to go wherever I want.' They need this to work properly and not have to jump through hoops."

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Employees should view benefit leaders as advocates for their well-being, and empowering them to save money while receiving quality healthcare does just that. For employers, this is a clear pathway to attracting and retaining talent, says Newman. 

"For organizations, now's the time to push and educate employees on how much value you are giving them, because people understand health care costs going up," Newman says. "Make sure that the benefits you're putting in have value, that [employees are] able to use it when they need to, and they know how to use it. Then, you're getting the value [that comes from] their understanding that you're offering them something amazing."