Putting Healthcare Intelligence to Work For Your Employees

Your employee’s health is an investment. Very rarely are employers going to see immediate responses to the time and resource that they put toward providing their team with adequate healthcare, but there are longer-term benefits to be had—they’re just harder to quantify without the right healthcare intelligence.

Employers who want to put their healthcare benefits to work for their employees need more than access to healthcare data, they need to understand that healthcare data. Bringing on a healthcare intelligence software like Springbuk can help aggregate and quantify that data in a way that has tangible benefits for employees down the road. Here are a few ways that health intelligence software can help improve and invest in employee health.

Data that Feeds Your Healthcare Intelligence Platform

To help explain things a little more clearly, we’ve laid out a few specific areas that employers can work within their healthcare intelligence software to produce expected results.

• Prescription Drug Data – One of the largest healthcare costs year over year is the prescription drugs we use to treat our illnesses. For employers that self-fund their insurance and are looking to contain their healthcare costs, knowing which drugs are being prescribed and whether there are alternatives is hugely important.
• Focus Populations – While not necessarily a data type, employers can gain a lot of insight from member health data when it has been grouped. One married male with a family history for hypertension has his own set of data, but patterns begin to emerge when he is included with other males in his age group, or with other members who have the same risk stratification or wellness participation.
• Biometric Screening Data – Biometric screenings illuminate a lot of health information when employees opt in to these programs. Employers often partner with clinics or wellness vendors to collect baseline tests that put hard numbers to certain markers that give a good overall view of health. This type of raw healthcare data is great fuel for intelligence platforms looking to make educated recommendations for improving employee health.
• Medical Claims and Wellness Participation Data – Whereas biometric screenings give a good baseline view of employee health, medical claims and wellness participation data give an ongoing picture. Over time, healthcare intelligence tools can read the number of medical claims, the severity of the medical claims, participation in wellness programs, and bring that all together into one centralized system for recommendations about how to improve that employee’s health.

Insights Gleaned From Your Member Population

With a few sample data inputs, we can now understand what exactly a healthcare intelligence solution does in terms of helping employers understand their healthcare spend.

• Savings on Drug Costs – With the cost of prescription drugs at a sky-high level, there are usually ways for employers to address the issue. In many cases, there are generic forms of popular drugs that produce the same results for half the price. Identifying these potential areas for prescription changes could have a huge effect on an employer’s healthcare spend by the end of the year.
• Gaps in Care – One of the most telling statistics pulled from employee health data is the gap in care metric. This particular set of data looks at any illness or disease that an employee or member has been diagnosed with and compares that with whether or not they’ve been getting treatment for that diagnosis. Luckily for employers, this is very basic member population health data that can be collected rather easily by any type of healthcare intelligence platform.
• Fewer Illness-Related Incidents – In Springbuk, gaps in care are used to help forecast potential healthcare issues that pop-up whenever someone’s illness isn’t being treated. There are numeric patterns that a healthcare intelligence platform like Springbuk can analyze to give recommendations in avoiding these illness-related incidents. Whether that is a change in prescription, a new wellness plan, or another health-related investment, gaps in care analyzation saves money by building better long-term health.
• More Targeted Wellness Plans – Focus populations and member groups aren’t effective on their own. Their real worth lies in the data they provide to employers and wellness professionals, allowing for the construction of effective strategies to deliver healthcare. Grouping employees that face similar issues and have similar backgrounds can contain the cost of treating and helping those same members.