“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.”