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The Future of Employer Health Insurance

Employers are always looking for ways to reduce one of their biggest expenditures–the cost of providing health insurance to employees. Many employers have explored solutions such as adding wellness plans, reducing usage, and providing different provider access mechanisms, all with modest success.
Stemming the rising costs of health insurance requires management to understand and improve healthcare outcomes for their employee and dependent populations. Changing the future of employer health insurance will require a multi-faceted approach:

Driving additional value by reducing utilization of healthcare services within these employer populations.
Utilizing a wider lens through which to view performance of various providers, then making decisions based on those who are consistently providing low cost, high quality care.
Employer will need to combine their data with other companies across a geographic region to get a better picture of the provider landscape than has ever been possible before.

Employer Health Plans: Keys to Lowering Cost, Boosting Benefits

Employers that offer robust employee health plans at affordable costs are more likely to attract and retain a great workforce. Healthcare, however, is often a top expense for organizations, making balancing attractive benefits with attractive costs a complex undertaking. Employers need a deep understanding of employee populations and opportunities to manage health plan costs without sacrificing quality.
An analytics-driven approach to employee population health management gives employers insight into two key steps to lower healthcare costs and enhance benefits:

Manage easily fixed cost issues.
Use healthcare cost savings to fund expanded benefits.

Build a Mission-Driven Culture in Healthcare

A mission-driven culture is a must-have in today’s rapidly changing healthcare environment. Culture is a vital component of a successful organization, as it builds an engaged and committed workforce that’s capable of adapting to shifting demands.
Four principles form the basis of a mission-driven culture:

Engage life-long learners and great listeners.
Assume positive intent.
Avoid entitlement.
Aim for long-term commitment.

Employee Wellness: A Combination of Personal Accountability and Corporate Responsibility

A strong employee wellness program is the first step to encouraging better health and creating meaningful, positive change in the lives of employees and their families. A well-designed healthcare insurance plan, a comprehensive wellness program, and creating a culture of personal accountability for wellness can optimize healthcare spending and improve employee health. It can also bolster the understanding and shared accountability for healthcare costs between the employees and the company.

Healthcare Analytics Careers: New Roles for the Brave, New World of Value-based Care

Job titles can be leading indicators of the direction an industry is moving and the same holds true for healthcare. The new healthcare economic model—from fee-for-service (FFS) to value-based—is driving a change in roles and responsibilities for professionals seeking healthcare analytics careers. Motivated by CMS and commercial payers, healthcare organizations are realizing the need to find and hire new types of healthcare professionals, a Chief Population Health Officer or Vice President of Clinical Informatics, who are focused on value. Senior leaders are seeking to build teams that have the ability to bring together analytics, best-practice clinical content, and process improvement to create long-term, sustainable change across their healthcare systems.

Health Catalyst Jobs: Growing and Innovating with Help from Utah

The State of Utah is helping Health Catalyst grow and add jobs through tax incentives. This will mean almost 300 potential new jobs located in Utah over the next five years. We consider this to be a kind of investment Utah is making in Health Catalyst. Utah is experiencing booming growth and as Health Catalyst achieves success, we add to this growth by contributing jobs and providing economic stimulus to support industries around us. We are grateful to Utah for the vote of confidence in allocating its scare and important public resources. It’s an honor to work and live here.