The Kansas City Collaborative (KC2), a three-year long value based benefit project, succeeded in helping the 15 participating employers share best practices for overcoming health care challenges. Nine of these companies reported that they have saved almost $11 million in direct health care costs by implementing a value-based benefits initiative.
The ambitious project, led by the non-profit Mid-America Coalition on Health Care, involved 400,000 Kansas City-area employees and their dependents. The National Business Coalition on Health and Pfizer Inc. supported the work.
The program focused on providing employees and dependents access to better health information, making preventive care more available, engaging them in reducing health risks and accessing earlier treatment of chronic disease.
”It’s always easier to learn from other peoples’ mistakes, than to make them on your own…It was truly a collaborative piece,” says KC2 participant Melissa Campbell, benefits manager for American Century Investments.
Campbell’s employee population currently is healthy, but with many workers approaching their mid- to late 40s, she believes it’s important to catch potential health risks early.
Though ACI has long provided free preventive services, after working with the other employers in the community, the company has eliminated its age limits for preventive services. Now, if a doctor feels an employee needs a test before the recommended age in traditional guidelines, the company will cover it 100%.
“We took away the age barrier and [felt] it would strengthen the doctor patient relationships,” she says.
In 2010, preventive care utilization rose to 63% at ACI, compared to the corporate norm of just 46%.
Campbell says the company is succeeding in its goal of “keeping healthy people healthy.”
ACI also added a tobacco-cessation program for the 8% of the population that smokes — a small group, but as Campbell realizes, a costly one. ACI pays for doctor visits, prescriptions, counseling, and over-the-counter drugs to help employees quit.
Mirroring ACI’s successes, eight additional KC2 employer-participants have achieved an estimated average savings of $194 per employee as a result of focusing on reducing costly chronic diseases through this program. among the participants’ cost-saving strategies:
- 60% offer preventive care treatment with no copay, and 60% waive copays for medication for those enrolled in disease management programs.
- 50% charge lower insurance premiums for employees completing a health risk assessment, obtaining an annual physical, becoming a nonsmoker or reducing body weight by 5%.
- 30% implemented new benefit programs to help employees to quit smoking.
- 100% offer healthy cafeteria and vending machine options and 89% provide onsite fitness facilities or other convenient options to help employees get in shape.
The KC2 employers also worked to tear down information silos so that data could flow freely between internal departments and external vendors. KC2 helped each employer develop a scorecard for their goals, so that they could more uniformly measure participation and health.
“What surprised me was the thought that I [shouldn’t] treat these vendors as suppliers, but [rather] treat them as part of my team,” says Campbell. She encourages employers to explain health goals to vendors and have them measure and report using employer-provided metrics and definitions.
“By having everyone speak the same language or provide the data with the same lines in the sand, we were able to see how people were progressing through disease states and whether we were capturing the right people at the right point in time,” Campbell says.
Though some employers made dramatic changes to their benefits design, Campbell says it was possible for others, like her, to tackle problems in piecemeal while still making a difference.
“You can take little steps to make changes, and you don’t have to go quite as far as these others have done. A lot of us have to take a little slower steps to make changes for value based benefits,” she explains.
“It doesn’t mean tearing apart your benefits structure and starting over, you can cut off small areas that cost a lot or future cost drivers and tackle a little at a time,” Campbell adds. “It was great to make friends with some of the people in the community who were struggling with the same benefits challenges that I was.”
