Conferences

Thoughts From the NEHI Employee Health Promotion Conference

Sitting at the NEHI conference today, a couple of quick thoughts:

First, Dr. Ron Goetzel notes that one of the largest sources of the escalating cost of health care is innovation itself – new prescription drugs and new technology. This backwards incentive is fueled by a complete lack of top down pressure for cost reduction. Innovation has no need to be aimed at reducing costs – and instead seems aimed at increasing care options at additional cost. Until we can provide incentives for innovation of cheaper alternative products and process, the unchecked increases in costs will just fuel innovation not aimed at efficiency.

Second, a great presentation from Goetzel on case studies of employer organized health promotion plans, but sadly the focus was on large American companies with predominantly US-based employee bases. Justifiably, the buzz among attendees turned to how all of these good ideas could practically be applied to small business. The suggestion was made by Goetzel that the same approach used in Massachusetts to service fully insured small businesses for the individual mandate (the Health Connector) could be used to aggregate firms around wellness.

This seems a bit simplistic. The incentives are simply not there. You could indeed crowd-source the employment of wellness across a larger employee population through a cooperative, but you cannot expect all participants motivations to align. Perhaps a model where participation in the connector itself were tied to roll-out of a standard wellness program could work, where participants not wishing to roll out wellness across their company could pay credits to opt out and further incentivize those who do wish to participate could create some efficiencies while employing wellness across a larger but transient employee population.

Tags: employee health, wellness

Ryan Norris is a technical architect at Medullan. He has a background working with physicians and clients in the eHealth space in developing and delivering solutions that better interconnect providers and create more informed patients through extensible service architectures and highly-usable interfaces.