Dawn Beaudin prioritizes primary care access at Hyatt

Dawn Beaudin (00:06):

I think our biggest challenge as always is cost containment. The rising cost of healthcare is certainly a major consideration for us as an employer, and it's only getting worse with the technology that continues to advance, especially in the pharmaceutical world. The rising cost of prescription drugs, great advancements in science, but they come at a cost. And so a big part of our concern is figuring out how we can manage that and make sure that we can keep healthcare affordable, both for us as an employer as well as for our employees.



(00:37):

Well, we've done a lot in the last year around the area of financial wellbeing, and we're really excited about everything we've done to help our colleagues and their financial wellness and their financial security. So we're going to continue to lean in on that and provide our employees with as many tools and resources as we can to ensure that they have that financial security. But the other thing that we're really excited about is moving in a little bit more in the advanced primary care space. And specifically we're trying to get our colleagues into see doctors early on rather than waiting until they have an urgent issue and they end up in the emergency room. So we know based on our data that we've got relatively low primary care utilization. Not enough of our colleagues are getting preventive care screenings, and what we're really hoping to do is have more opportunities to bring care to them where we can and actually have care available onsite and remove the barriers that often exist for our colleagues.



(01:43):

The biggest piece of advice I would give to my fellow benefit leaders is know your people. Know your employees. Understand what makes them tick, know what they value. Use data to understand how they've reacted. Measure your communications, the successes, the failures. Really understand what it is that your people use and don't use. And without that, I don't think you can really be successful in providing a valuable benefit program that they will value for making sure that they take care of the health of themselves and their colleagues.