How Employers Are Becoming the Saviors of Healthcare

During our latest webinar, How Employer Heroes are Saving Healthcare, we discussed how employers are becoming the saviors of healthcare as more transition to offering a primary healthcare model. The model is helping to improve health outcomes, while saving employers money.

Marathon Health CMO and webinar series host, Shelly Towns, spoke with Rachel Stevens, Senior Director of Human Resources for the Indianapolis Airport Authority; Erin Eason, National Director for the Clinical Consulting Practice at CBIZ; and Jeff Wells, MD, CEO & co-founder of Marathon Health.

They identified 4 critical success metrics — provider experience, patient experience, healthy outcomes and financial savings — and talked specifically about why the employer healthcare model is superior in each.

The group discussed some of the challenges employers face trying to provide quality care to their employees while keeping costs down. Everyone agrees that a key component is getting employees to be more proactive with their health. For example, encouraging them by offering incentives, like discounts on their healthcare premiums, when they get an annual physical at their employer-sponsored healthcare center.

“Employers are going to solve our healthcare crisis in the United States,” Wells says. “Traditional healthcare just doesn’t work for people and employers are going to be the stakeholder group that helps to fix it.”

An employer healthcare model can also help to attract and retain employees by offering more accessible healthcare benefits. The outcome of doing so can result in better health for employees throughout an organization, including better management of chronic conditions like diabetes.

Watch the full webinar.

When asked in a poll question if free primary care health centers will be part of every employer’s benefits package in the next five years, 70% of webinar participants agreed. And in the second poll, over half said that employers are in a position to transform health in the United States, but need support from partners to do so.

A great example of this is by providing different healthcare options for medium- to smaller-sized employers, such as Network health centers that offer offsite care to multiple businesses in the same city or virtual primary care, particularly for remote employees.

The panel also shared stories of various employees who’ve experienced positive outcomes thanks to their employee healthcare centers. They said the positive outcomes have been driven by the close relationships employees form with the clinical staff.

“With the help of her Marathon Health clinician, [one of our employees has] lost 35 pounds and is exercising daily,” says Stevens. “She’s also improved her blood pressure and cholesterol and is eating healthier.”

Learn more about how employer healthcare is changing the game and delivering measurable results to employers while also keeping costs down.