A physically, fiscally fit workforce
Employers provide preventive incentives
Bobby Hoang with Walgreens listens to First Horizon National Corp. CEO Bryan Jordan discuss employee health incentives.
Evidence that health care has changed for employers rode on the hip of First Horizon National Corp. CEO Bryan Jordan Thursday morning — a step-counting pedometer.
The thumb-sized devices are available to First Horizon employees but they represent a big shift in employer-sponsored health care. The front office still wants to help employees when they’re sick, but has a new emphasis on keeping them well.
First Horizon now has Weight Watchers groups, smoking cessation resources and incentives and fitness classes, of which Jordan joked, “I have my pedometer on, but I’m not doing Zumba yet.”
But his fi nancial fi rm takes wellness seriously and has heavily invested in it because “in these tough economic times, controlling (health care) costs is vital,” Jordan told a group gathered at the University Memphis Holiday Inn for the Memphis Business Group on Health’s annual conference.
The programs help do that, he said, with fewer
September 6, 2012 - First Horizon National Corp. CEO and president Bryan Jordan addresses members of the Memphis doctor visits and lower insurance premiums.
“Instead of focusing only on managing the cost, we must purposefully invest in promoting prevention versus dealing with illness,” Jordan said, and in doing so First Horizon has started “to see the payback and overall improvement in health outcomes.”
A bigger, more noticeable change in health care can be found on doctor bills and employees’ paychecks. Health care costs continue to rise and employees are expected to pay more as high-deductible health plans become more prevalent, said Clayton Nicholas, marketing and strategy vice president for Brentwood, Tenn.based Change Healthcare.
Worker wages increase 4 percent on average each year, he said, but their average contributions to their health plans have increased 13 percent annually.
This is creating a new kind of consumer, the health care shopper, and many of them expect to shop for doctors, drugs and tests online the same way they would shop for shoes, vacations or books. Change Healthcare bridges this gap with easierto-understand information on health care costs and quality. One format shown Thursday looked like Google Maps.
“Employees are making this shift to (health care) consumerism and they need help to make those decisions,” Nicholas said.
The biggest change on the health care industry landscape in the last two years has been the alignment of doctor groups and hospitals. They are teaming up so they can control the care each patient gets as payments in the future will be based on the health outcomes of their patients versus the amount of services they give them.
Baptist Memorial Health Care Corp. is now teamed with 363 physicians, Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare now has agreements with about 300 (with a pending agreement that could bring 90 more by year’s end) and the Saint Francis system is aligned with about 50, system leaders said Thursday.