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Meetings & Organizations
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Sept 24-26, 2013
Hilton at Walt Disney World
Jan 27-28, 2014
Fairmont Scottsdale Princess Hotel
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Greetings!
We survived another summer, and we are now into fall. This is an important season for health care because employers are in their enrollment periods and benefit re-design is done for the year. HR departments are getting ready for C-level reporting, and the vendor groups that roam the employer landscape are trying to meet their sales projections. Implementation teams are also trying to make sure that they can open by the promised January 1 date, and the PPACA is now impacting decisions at all levels of the health care purchasing and provider communities. (Yes, I know that everyone calls it OBAMACARE, but that is not the officially sanctioned name.)
The emerging trends for this last year include the engagement of brokers around the country attempting (and succeeding) in the consolidation of care through the coordination of near-site and on-site services to employees provided by many employers. We have seen more introspection and inspection of existing programs by employers who are now seeing numbers and comparing them to the sales promises made by the vendors. Lots of surprises here - some good and some not so good. For an updated listing of vendors, see the vendor tab at www.onsiteclinics.org. We have restricted our listings to only those vendors that are active on a regional or national basis and who will respond to an RFP if it is solicited.
Hospitals, health care systems, and doctors continue to focus in the "on-site" space but without much impact, except on local levels where some of them do command a great deal of respect. We continue to ask hospitals that want to be in the on-site delivery of care arena what they do for their own employees. Often, the answer is that they just allow their own workforce to use the traditional fee-for-service system that they are trying to replace at a nearby employer site. When they compete with major vendors who are actively serving their own employees and who have their own programming, this can be a challenge. Cerner, Walgreens, and QuadMed can each take the employer to a site where they are covering the needs of their own workforce, and they all can claim that the lessons they learn in the field are at work at home.
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Walgreens and Who? Johns Hopkins Medicine
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Now even the prestigious Johns Hopkins Medicine is on board, so-to-speak, with the opening of a Walgreens store (with health and wellness services for students and the medical staff) on the premises of the East Baltimore medical campus. This will also include a clinic, the first one to open in the state of Maryland. This was the comment of the president of Johns Hopkins Healthcare: the services ". . . will benefit not only Johns Hopkins employees and the surrounding community, but also form the level of health care collaboration that could serve as a
national model." (Emphasis added.)
As many know, Johns Hopkins has been very aggressive in contracting for employer secondary care services. You can read about the Johns Hopkins / PEPSI arrangement as we reported it in 2011 at our companion Website. Johns Hopkins also provides a myriad of disease state management tools and reference materials. This is an important development that could be a game changer for on-site programming.
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Huffington Post Commentator Urges NYC to Adopt On-Site Clinics
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urging the City to implement on-site clinic programming for its more than 300,000 employees and their dependents. He has apparently done some research on this and feels the City could save up to $150 million/year (on a current spend of $6.3 BILLION, predicted to go to $8.3 billion by 2019).
The city has discussed this for some time, and we have been present at some meetings where those discussions occurred. Hopefully, Mr. de Blasio's very public comments, statistics, and encouragement will push the process along. He proposes 20 clinics. Perhaps one of the barriers, at least initially, will be the strong union forces at work. The SEIU (Service Employees International Union) is said to be the most powerful now in the U.S. (no longer are the auto worker unions the giants). So someone is going to have to persuade those union reps that on-sites don't just reduce costs, they improve quality of care - for a group of people who frequently struggle to get primary care in such a large city.
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| Lacks Enterprises and CareATC - On-site Comes to Grand Rapids, MI | |
This month, Grand Rapids is hosting development team members from CareATC who are implementing on-site services at Lacks Enterprises. This is another example of a committed and purposeful on-site vendor coming into an environment where health care services and resources abound - except that they are not structured to serve the needs of the employer community. I mention this particular contract event and implementation because Grand Rapids is my home town, and it is also home to three very capable health care systems - Spectrum Health, which is becoming nationally prominent; Mercy Health, which is part of the largest Catholic-sponsored health care organization in the country; and Metro Health, which has a newly-constructed, state-of-the-art hospital in a prime consumer service location. Each of these systems is guided by top level administrative teams, and each has a full range of contracted and employed physicians. So why does Lacks Enterprises need an Oklahoma-based firm to manage its health care services on-site?
On-site services and employer-focused health care support is different than the deployment of community service health care. Simply stated, hospitals don't yet "get it," and the people in the on-site vendor community do. We welcome CareATC to West Michigan, and we congratulate Lacks Enterprises for going to the next level for their employees.
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Take a look at the upcoming seminars and educational events. I admit that I sat out the Chicago conferences this year, but I have reports that they were very successful. Congratulations to GLOBAL for their largest attendance ever! These meetings continue to be an important source of information and knowledge exchange. NAWHC has focused on regional offerings with a great deal of success, and they will follow their New York conference with offerings in Milwaukee, Chicago, and California. If they come to town, you should attend and meet other employers in your own area who are involved in workplace health services.
Sincerely,  Mike La Penna
The La Penna Group, Inc. |
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