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Studies have shown that about 8% of employees account for 70% of organizations' healthcare costs. The healthcare costs of the 20% of Americans, or 100 million people, have soared to $900 billion a year using-up 70% of healthcare resources in the country.
Can companies get a grip on rising health-care costs & improve productivity?
REMEDY provides organizations with a powerful means to control their healthcare costs and improve the productivity of its employees. Whether it is used to digitize an existing health, wellness or disease management program for greater effectiveness and efficiencies or if it is to initiate the implementation of such a program within a company, REMEDY™ will provide a cogent benefit-to-cost ratio in hard dollar costs and productivity improvements.
Savings of more than 10 times the cost of the programs. Studies by The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality ( www.ahrq.gov) demonstrated overall savings in healthcare costs in the utilization of chronic disease self-management programs were more than 10 times the cost of the programs themselves. These programs were enabled without the cost efficiency benefits of technology which would have saved the programs additional monies in the labor intensive administration of such systems.
Manage Multiple Conditions with a Single REMEDY™
Studies have shown you can substantially improve the productivity of employees by educating them and allowing them to manage their conditions at the same time targeting reducing the costs of the highest risk people with such conditions as:
- Cardiovascular Diseases
- Diabetes
- Cancers
- Respiratory Illnesses
- Arthritis
- Obesity
The objective: an end to one-size-fits-all coverage. Instead, the flexibility of REMEDY™ is in its design that allows for personalized 1-to-1 outreach of healthcare promotion & management suited to the specific needs of each employee's condition. Automated 24/7 help & monitoring assists employees with the highest risks in self-management, so the cost of those risks can be contained.
Handled properly, a company could realize minimum savings of 3% to 5% annually on its healthcare costs. In General Motors' case, 5% would be $225 million.
Patient- Centric, Patient Empowering Care Reduces Costs
Managing chronic conditions involves going beyond episodic, symptomatic care to monitoring patients over the long term, and providing continuous treatment that prevents worsening of their condition and maintains stable function. True patient-focused care must begin and, for as long as possible, remain outside of institutional settings. Assessing risk, planning prevention and coping with symptom fluctuation must happen at home, school, work and other non-clinical settings as any health system moves toward a population-health focus to reducing costs.
REMEDY™’s Patient controlled care is focused on:
- Patient empowerment through enhanced education resulting in treatment regimen compliance
- Predicting “lapse”, preventing ‘relapse’ and insuring against “collapse”
- Involve the patient in his/her own management of their condition
Examples of Targeted Employee Groups that can benefit from a REMEDY™ program are:
- Health Monitoring for Executives
- Chronically Ill Employees
- Emergency Services (Fire & Police departments show excessive healthcare costs of its employees who succumb to disease while on the job.)
- Professional & Amateur Athletes
Using Technology to Solve the Problems Associated with Health, Wellness & Disease Self-Management Programs
The issue has been the sustainability of these programs both in terms of ongoing costs and the recruitment & retention of patients and physicians. Setting-up and maintaining programs in the past required additional labor resources such as clinicians to input and monitor patient data as well as to coordinate the activities of patients with other caregivers in their respective points in the circle-of-care. Inadequacies included the widespread failure to follow established practice guidelines because of the difficulty of monitoring. As a result, many managed care and integrated delivery systems have taken a great interest in correcting the many deficiencies in current management of diseases such as:
- Rushed practitioners managing increased patient volumes
- Coordination & Communication between healthcare providers is poor (e.g. MD – Pharma – Hospital)
- Lack of active patient monitoring between physician visits to ensure the best outcomes
- Inefficient means to collect, enter, track & analyze data while maintaining care
- Inadequate and Poor Data quality
For patients, problems managing disease include:
- Inconvenience: Difficult for patients to collect & store data about their condition between visits
- Difficulty communicating with their caregiver. It tends to be time fragmented, initiated mostly by the patient and limited by the patient’s accessibility
- Low motivation toward compliance with recommended medication regimen.
- Under-estimation of severity of condition due to lack of monitoring
Employer Benefits
Employers worry a lot about absenteeism, but new research suggests a bigger threat to productivity is “presenteeism”: sick workers who show up at work but are not fully functioning. U.S. companies may be losing $150 billion annually this way.. Educating employees and monitoring treatment compliance improves such costs.
Surveys show that employees consistently want higher-quality healthcare, and so far, unions have not objected. Some cogent benefits include:
- Decreased healthcare costs
- Improved employee's health & productivity in turn increases recruitment, retention & dependability
- Reduction in workers' sick days and presenteeism
Case in Point: Canada Life Assurance in Toronto showed a return of $6.85 per corporate dollar invested through reduced turnover; productivity gains and decreased medical claims. In the first year of the Canada Life program, employee turnover was only 1.8% per year compared with an initial company-wide average of 18%. Seven years after the program started, turnover rates were still 8% lower among frequent program participants than among dropouts.
Save Money while Increasing Productivity Get a REMEDY™
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