Health care advisory firm PinnacleCare is moving into the employee benefits space. The 12-year-old company has traditionally offered its advisory services to wealthy, private clients, but it's recently launched PinnacleCare Connection, a service that connects employees with top physicians and medical institutions for second opinions and expedited appointments with their provider of choice.
The benefit is available in a number of ways: Employees can pay for it directly through payroll on a voluntary basis, employers can purchase the benefit and pay on a per employee per month basis, or employers can use a retainer-based model.
When diagnosed with a serious illness, patients and their families often need to make difficult and complex treatment decisions and many feel compelled to act quickly. The advisory service is "a means of giving back decision support to employees," says Dr. Miles Varn, chief medical officer, PinnacleCare. "The decision support component is so important in this environment."
PinnacleCare advisers will look at an employee's case, collect all the relevant data and records, and consult with medical experts to first ensure the correct diagnosis. Then, the company works with the patient to identify top doctors locally or centers of excellence nationally.
PinnacleCare estimates that about 30% of cases the company deals with are misdiagnoses.
"There's a multitude of things we do to help support and advise [patients] through the process and that could be help them avoid a surgery, change a course of treatment, we might change a medication or see a need for additional testing," says Todd Martin, chief sales and marketing officer. "And if you aggregate all that stuff, we basically have a positive influential change in about 38% of the cases we work with."
Employers, meanwhile, can reap financial benefits if employees are better educated about their treatment options. "There's got to be higher quality and better outcomes at better cost," says Varn. "We looked at ensuring patients get good service and outcomes, and it just so happens that lowers costs."
And despite the company's beginnings as a service for the wealthy, Varn emphasizes that all patients are treated equally. "If you're a billionaire or a guy on the street, we don't treat you any differently," he says.
Cancer care
According to a survey released earlier this year by Best Doctors and National Coalition on Health Care, 38.5% of physicians cited "fragmented or missing information across medical information systems" when asked what they viewed as the most significant barrier to accurately diagnosing cancer.
The survey of 400 leading cancer specialists from Best Doctors' physician database assessed how often participating doctors believe misdiagnoses occur, what physicians feel are the most significant barriers to accurately diagnosing and characterizing cancers, and the tools or technology doctors feel would best help them improve diagnostic accuracy rates.
Physicians' perceive that misdiagnoses occur less often than published studied indicate. When asked how often they estimate misdiagnosis or incomplete characterizations occur in oncology, the majority of respondents (60.5%) estimated zero to 10% of the time. This figure is noteworthy, as published studies indicate significantly higher rates of misdiagnoses overall, from 15% to 28% of cases (according to The American Journal of Medicine and BMJ Quality & Safety, respectively).
