“Overview: Employers and the delivery system have much to gain from a more engaged relationship. More contact will result from the acceptance that costs have to be controlled, shift to a more managed consumerism model and the changing provider landscape. Both sides need to spend time understanding each other – one person’s waste is another’s income. It will be more realpolitik than cumbaya – incentives trump intention every day of the week. But there is a common goal: follow the money but respect the mission.”

NBCH Annual Meeting Keynote Presentation

“The pace of change in the US healthcare system reminds me of a seminal book, Future Shock, which defined a psychological state in which people get “disoriented” because of “too much change in a short a period of time”. The situation is exacerbated by what the author, Alvin Toffler, called “information overload”, a term that was used for the first time in that book. Toffler is one of the few futurists who actually seems to have been able to predict the future—-at least in the health care space. With the health insurance exchanges opening for business in October of this year, employer fines and individual mandates hitting next January, and the pace of hospital and doctor consolidation exceeding anything we have seen before, separating the “signal from the noise” in the overload of information out there is critical—both to rational planning and to staying “oriented” (another word for sane).”

“We wanted to share the exciting news that Equity Healthcare achieved a significant milestone this week when our cost savings results were verified by an independent, third party audit. Al Lewis, Executive Director of the Disease Management Purchasing Consortium (DMPC) and a respected healthcare authority, has named Equity Healthcare as one of only 6 vendors to validly measure healthcare outcomes.”

What is in the Quarterly Dashboards? How to interpret the results of the Quarterly Dashboards? How do you know if you are an outlier? What to do if you are an outlier?

“In 2010, Equity Healthcare made a decision to partner with Quest Diagnostics to provide biometric services to our member companies as a precursor to where we saw innovative care management evolving, which was to use lab results to guide effective nurse coaching.”

Changing how doctors and hospitals are paid is the single most important thing we can do to eliminate unnecessary increases in health costs. We need to change the payment system from paying for how much is done to how well the right thing is done.

“For over ten years, the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation (ABIM) has worked toward ts mission of advancing medical professionalism into clinical policy and practice. Its work is an ongoing, collaborative process, engaging key stakeholders of the health care community including physicians, consumer organizations, delivery systems, policy professionals and patients to build a shared understanding and to advance the tenets of professionalism in practice. Choosing Wisely® is part of a multi-year effort of the ABIM Foundation, along with a wide variety of well respected partner organizations, to help physicians be better stewards of health care resources in support of evidence based guidelines.”

“Thank you all for attending our recent Equity Healthcare Employer Summit in Florida and for taking the time to complete our post-Summit survey. We truly appreciate your survey responses as your feedback is extremely useful as we plan for our future EH Summits. To set the stage, we had a very high response rate from our employer clients at 62%. Based on the survey results and your comments, we are pleased to share that our EH employer clients indicated that this was the best EH Employer Summit thus far and gave us an overall satisfaction rate of 95%.”

Consumerism is now the dominant employer strategy to move healthcare cost management to the next level. Despite the fact that it seems like common sense that people would be naturally engaged when making decisions about their health and one of the biggest parts of their personal budget, the reality is that only about 5-10% of any workforce are active and informed consumers of healthcare. Most employees still think that prices and cost aren’t important because “my insurance will pay”. They also believe that doctors and hospitals all deliver the same quality. The facts are in on both of these beliefs: neither could be further from the truth.

Organized and accessible data, which is the life-blood of most industries, has been a real struggle for healthcare. In this article, Blake Zenger, Chief Informatics Officer at Equity Healthcare, discusses how “big data” is a requirement for making the leap to data-driven decision making by employers.

“What major decisions do employers have to make today about health reform? It is tempting to sit back and wait in the face of the uncertainty of the Supreme Court ruling next summer and the Presidential election a few months later. But since I cannot find an expert I trust willing to handicap either of those events, it’s worth modeling the scenario that would most impact employers– in which the Court rules in favor of reform and the Democrats keep the White House.”

“Although many Washington, DC policy experts believe that the arrival of insurance exchanges in 2014 will lead to a mass exodus of employers away from sponsoring health benefits, I think the above quotation from Mark Twain, prompted by his reading his own (obviously premature) obituary, applies to employer-sponsored insurance as well. While a McKinsey survey that was released in June, 2011, showed that over 30% of employers said they would move to the exchanges, a recent survey by the National Business Group on Health indicated that the number was closer to 5%. The NBGH survey is close to what the Congressional Budget Office projected in its estimates for the health reform bill.”

How US health care reform will affect employee benefits? The shift away from employer-provided health insurance will be vastly greater than expected and will make sense for many companies and lower-income workers alike.

Probably…not, industry observers tell Health Plan Week.

“I’ll be writing in a direct, jargon-free way on a topic of interest in health care. Having been in the health sector for over three decades as a practicing physician, a “policy person”, a sometime academic and a full-time health care manager on the employer side, I see plenty of meetings, papers and marketers but very little straightforward talk. Of course, the thoughts expressed here, while they will seem like the truth to me, can only be my version of what’s taking place. And the ideas will be mine alone and not Blackstone’s or Equity Healthcare’s. I welcome comments from anyone who reads the posting. Fair warning: expect some debate coming back at you!”

Current changes in health reform legislation have added complexity to an already incendiary topic in the HR space, namely to health benefit management. In this presentation, Robert Galvin, M.D. navigates the pros and cons behind the legislation and delivers optimal health benefit development strategies for your organization.

Vestar is one of the Equity Healthcare Private Equity Partners. At the end of 2010, Gretchen Crist, SVP, HR at The Sun Products Corporation, delivered this presentation to Vestar’s HR Leadership team. It contains an overview of Equity Healthcare, and outlines what is new with the initiative as well as EH’s future vision.