Today we’re sharing insight from guest blogger, Dr. Eric Bricker, Chief Medical Officer of Compass Professional Health Services. We hope you enjoy Dr. Eric’s wisdom and perspective.
While there are many lessons learned from the past 8 years I’ve spent working with clients on their consumer directed health plans, three in particular stick out.
Lesson #1 – If You Build It, They Will NOT Come
Just because you put in a consumer direct health plan or a high deductible health plan, that does not mean employees will begin behaving like savvy health care consumers and obtain higher quality, more cost-effective care. In my experience, employees and their health care providers continue with their same habits in terms of how they make decisions. Then the employees can become upset with sticker shock after they see how much they have to pay. For them, consumer plan just equals ‘cost-shift.’
Lesson #2—Engage, Engage, Engage
An employer cannot expect to tell an employee once during open enrollment how to be a better health care consumer and how to use their new consumer directed health plan. The employees must be educated again and again and again, with different messages via different media at different times throughout the year. This is not because the employees are ‘dense,’ in fact they are very smart. It is just because being an empowered health care consumer is new.
Consumerism is a new paradigm and it requires a cultural shift within the group in terms of how they view and use their benefits. However, companies that have ‘crossed the chasm’ and achieved that goal have seen their health care costs decrease by millions, while maintaining or even increasing their benefits satisfaction.
Lesson #3—Help Employees With What THEY Want Before You Give Them The Kind Of Help That YOU Want
In my experience, the three most common pain points for employees new to a consumer health plan are:
- How do I make sense of all these bills and EOBs?
- Help me find a good doctor.
- How does all this HSA/HRA/FSA stuff work?
Notice “help me compare costs for a test or a procedure” is not in the top three. You, as an employer, may want the employees to look for and use more cost-effective providers - and the employees want to as well. But you have to walk before run. Or rather, you have to address the fundamentals of being a health care consumer before you can tackle the more difficult challenges.
What do you think? What do you think are the three biggest challenges of being on a consumer directed health plan? What mistakes have you seen others make that you as an employer have avoided?
This content was written and shared by guest blogger, Dr. Eric Bricker. It originally appeared in the Compass Healthcare Consumerism Blog.
Dr. Eric Bricker is a Johns Hopkins trained internal medicine physician and Chief Medical Officer of Compass Professional Health Services. Dr. Bricker has published research on the quality of diabetes care and treatment of hospital-acquired infections. Prior to becoming a physician, Dr. Bricker was a hospital finance consultant, working on billing projects at major medical centers across the country.
Connect with Dr. Eric on Twitter or read more of his blogs.
To learn more about Compass Professional Health Services, visit their website, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
