July 14, 2020
Making healthcare a priority for business sustainability amidst COVID-19
Now is the time to take a look at the connection between healthcare spend and the value it brings to your business by making employees well and helping them cope with such challenging times both physically, emotionally and mentally.
Much has been written about COVID-19 and its impact on our business and the global economy. Organizational sustainability is one of the key factors that will ensure that our business thrives and grows. An essential part of this is how we integrate healthcare in our organization’s operations. Now, more than ever, focusing on employee wellness is a good investment for medium- to long-term sustainability.
There are four (4) key healthcare spend areas you need to consider amidst these times:
1. Get a proper benefits utilization assessment. You can task your human resources team to ensure that utilization is tracked efficiently or adopt automation into your HR processes so that tracking of employee benefits is done systematically and regularly. Real-time data (statistics) is important to effectively and periodically assess how you can make adjustments to your benefits program. Understanding what benefits are not optimized by your team members and understanding how to balance your benefits portfolio are essential for you to eliminate unnecessary overhead. What out-patient and in-patient services could be redefined and re-costed are all part of assessing what will make your portfolio balanced and responsive to your needs. Working with a broker to help you figure out how to create hybrid programs that combine benefits you can avail of, from health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and other sources that can provide you 24/7 COVID-19 monitoring, response and coverage, wellness programming, and such, would be good to explore.
A few years ago, our team had the opportunity to deal with a huge headcount local conglomerate in a high profile industry with the challenge of a medical benefit plan design which was created when their employee base was still manageable and benefits were generous to a fault. The executive benefit design was basically limitless and allowed coverage for items that were not medically necessary such as LASIK surgery. The plan also had inner limits and complicated layers of coverage. In addition, there were separate or different providers for the outpatient services and inpatient benefits. Claims data or experience was incomplete and unreliable.
The goal for the bnfts.ph team was to provide services to address the uncontrollable costs related to the current design by looking at available claims data and conducting several focus group discussion (FGDs) basically to determine the level of employee satisfaction with the plan. Part of the project deliverable was also to recommend changes in the current plan design and the steps needed to implement them. As a broker, and because of our team’s strong strategic relationships with the major providers of medical plans, our team was able to migrate the company into one provider and basically grandfather the costlier benefits.
2. Develop an ear for your employee’s wellness priorities. Conducting regular surveys or touch-base conversations with employees would be important to do. The purpose behind such conversations would be to get a strategic sense of what health maintenance challenges your team members might be facing, given work-from-home or blended work arrangements. Outside of their declared medical challenges upon recruitment, the information you gather from this process should inform you what kind of employee wellness program can be created that would have good uptake, will be easily implementable, and sustainable. Employee wellness protects the business from team members being prone to contracting COVID-19 or other health threats. Preventive measures cost about a fifth of total reactive measures and generally tap into resources you already spend for as part of regular operations.
In most client partnerships bnfts.ph has engaged in, dialogue with employees in FGDs surface many crucial issues that otherwise would not have surfaced. Having a focused conversation with key management team members alone can surface several issues that otherwise may have been overlooked in the process of defining a holistic employee benefits program.
3. Tap professionals that can provide mental health, nutrition and wellness, for strengthening overall resistance of team members to various stresses brought on by COVID-19. Do not attempt to do it all in-house. Interventions are multi-dimensional and an interdisciplinary team is needed to see a proper wellness program through. Mental health assessments, psychologists, counselors, nutritionists, and strength-training coaches are good to tap to ensure a consistent, professional approach to maintaining overall immunity of your team members. Wellness must be holistic including mental, psychological and physical strengthening, considering the implications of lockdowns where people are unnaturally confined to their homes for long periods of time, where people adjust to the idea of no-contact through physical distancing, and where people have to periodically adjust to blended work arrangements, and the like. The cost of investing in these professionals, including outsourcing possible COVID-19 case monitoring, will be much less than your actual expenses on staff who might have to deal with the impact of being COVID-19 positive.
In the past three months, bnfts.ph has dealt with various logistics and construction companies that held off on having a COVID-19 hotline and their HR personnel were left to deal with the personalized demands of having one or several COVID-19 positive staff. A 24/7 COVID Hotline was linked to these partner-clients to relieve the Company of the sole burden of guiding those affected by (or even suspected of) COVID-19. To complement virus containment protocols, preventive interventions such as mental health support, nutrition programming and strength-training, are worthwhile investments. Strengthening the ‘herd’ is a proactive measure to contain and prevent the spread of COVID-19.
4. Redesign your physical spaces, processes, and reduce risk exposures. While most are in work-from-home arrangements at this time, ensuring that employees design their physical spaces for their wellness within their home and at the workplace is important. The use of air filters to respond to viral loading issues in confined spaces is a key investment (viral loading found to be the most contributory to COVID-19 infection). Or, at the very least, ensuring proper air circulation to avoid ‘stagnant air’ within a room is essential. The physical lay-out of the work area is important, whether one is at home or at the workplace. Investing in back-to-work redesign of the physical space would be important (i.e., floor markers and wall signages that serve as reminders for physical distancing and hand sanitation, space planning for 2-meter physical distancing and uni-directional traffic within the work spaces). Processes that require a lot of interaction with others can be reviewed and automated or be converted into self-service spaces. Redesigning physical space is an important preventive step for organizations for reducing exposure to risks. Whereby most organizations are focused on at-workplace protocols, reducing risk exposures include increased awareness (information, education, and communication) on travel and home habits and protocols of your team members, which are often overlooked.
The occurrence of COVID-19 supports a more expansive understanding of health. Health not limited to direct medical, dental, hospital and outpatient care, but health that holistically covers mental, emotional, psychological and physiological well-being. Institutionalizing wellness, safety and health, using real data (quantitative data from benefits statistics and qualitative data from FGDs) to clearly understand at what level of overall benefit spend will be beneficial to your organization, are key ways to increase organizational productivity and ensure business sustainability in this next normal we find ourselves in.
I want to know more on how to optimize healthcare in my organization!
I want to know more on how to optimize healthcare in my organization!
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