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Getting your health plan costs under control

Managing health plan costs and maintaining the health of your workforce are always priorities for your business. During difficult times, those priorities become even more critical. It’s essential to have a viable strategy to support both business costs and the health and well-being of your employees who help keep your business running.

Sharing financial risk

To share and reduce the financial risk to you and your employees, it helps to partner with a health plan that sets a fixed per-employee charge for comprehensive coverage instead of traditional fee-for-service-based insurance plans with high deductibles and PPO networks.

A Kaiser Permanente health plan can take on greater financial risk without becoming more expensive than traditional plans. Using a tightly integrated care delivery system, our plan can help:

  • Deliver a high-quality employee/member experience
  • Guide employees toward more effective health care resources
  • Produce better outcomes at a competitive cost

Our health care professionals have only one job: patient care. This distinction sets them apart from independent doctors in PPO networks who have the added distraction of administrative paperwork, in addition to running and maintaining their own practices while providing care.

Enabling efficient integration

In our integrated system, doctors and care teams work together in a safe environment, usually under one roof. They are connected to their patients and to each other through our leading electronic health record system, which allows them to provide informed, personalized care. This access means that employees who need to see multiple specialists won’t have to keep repeating their medical history. Or, if a care team needs to reference a patient’s list of current prescriptions to potentially avoid a dangerous drug interaction, they can find that information in the patient’s electronic health record. This arrangement enables efficient interaction to get the resources needed to address health issues promptly.

Empower your employees

You can help keep your employees healthy by motivating them to take greater responsibility for their own care. This can be accomplished by offering educational resources and information that’s easy for them to access and relevant to their individual experience.

Providing your employees with quick electronic access to their medical records and test results is an integral part of their empowerment. So is giving them practical and actionable insights about what the data means. This works best when employees are prompted to access their information when they need to address a particular health issue.

Convenience in getting care is fundamental. Employees must be able to get convenient and prompt access to medical professionals before their health concerns become more serious — and costly. By offering a variety of ways for employees to access care, it gives them more flexibility to seek care at a time that aligns with their individual needs and work-life schedules.

Getting employees care during work

For some health issues, employees who are Kaiser Permanente members can use convenient options to get the care they need without having to leave work. They can call our appointment and advice line, which is staffed by health care professionals who can handle many health concerns and is available at any time day or night. Members also can email their doctor’s office with nonurgent questions or set up an e-visit.

Instead of driving to the facility for an in-person appointment, a member can schedule a video visit instead. Our health care professionals have instant access to a member’s electronic health record, which might include current vital statistics that can be captured remotely. A video visit can take as little as 20 minutes of a member’s time as opposed to a 2-hour (or more) commute to a facility. And opting for a video visit over a facility appointment can also help limit the risk of exposure to a potentially harmful virus during a viral pandemic.

It’s easy for people to forget the routine preventive steps they need to take to help themselves healthy. Having an integrated health plan. external link helps them stay on track. To demonstrate, a member contacts their medical facility to schedule an appointment. The member liaison who receives the call can check the member’s electronic health record for other pending health matters. So, if your employee is going to their health facility for a dermatology appointment, they also can be guided to get a flu shot on that same visit.

Support for you

The same information technology infrastructure that enables efficient communication among health care professionals and members, also helps make life easier for you. Our health plan can provide you with historical data on rate trends and caps on annual rate adjustments that can help you optimize plan features for your workforce.

On the administrative side and consistent with regulatory requirements, you can access data that shows insights on the health status and needs of your workforce. Our health plan’s data interface helps enable easy communication between an employer’s human resources system and the health plan for employee census updates, billing, and related matters.

A Kaiser Permanente health plan that features integrated care delivered by highly qualified licensed medical professionals, the balance of financial risk between employers and the health plan, and world-class information systems, offers a sound, long-term strategy that can help keep your costs under control and maintain a healthy and productive workforce.

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