Adapting Your Current Benefit Strategy? Here’s The Key To Meeting The Needs Of Your Workforce.

While you want to expand your employees’ benefits, you’re also aware that associated expenses can be prohibitive. However, there is a way to adapt your current benefit strategy so it meets the unique needs of your workforce without increasing total cost of care.

When dedicated primary care for your workforce is added as the core of your benefit strategy, you have the opportunity to control costs, improve employee health and satisfaction, and become more competitive with your benefit offerings to better attract and retain top talent.

Why you need advanced primary care (APC) instead of more primary care

APC is an evolution of primary care delivering improved health outcomes, a better employee experience, and reduced costs. It does this through the use of aligned incentives, a clinically integrated care team approach, and a population health model supported by rich informatics. Care delivery is built around the specific needs of your employees.

Employees with access to APC are more likely to engage with their health, which means they: 

• Follow through on regular health screenings
• Build strong relationships with their providers
• Achieve healthy behavior change

When done right, APC improves health outcomes and reduces total cost of care. If you’re considering adding APC to your current benefit strategy, these four factors should be present:

1. Longer appointments

With APC, your employees spend more time with their primary care providers, discussing their concerns and creating relationships based on trust. This dynamic causes them to engage more deeply with their own health and successfully address the root causes of many health concerns.

2. An entire care team trained in empathetic listening

When the care team utilizes empathetic listening, a cornerstone of APC, to interact with their patients, they can help unlock true behavioral change. 

Empathetic listening builds an environment of trust and understanding, where each person is treated as an individual. Employees are supported in building self-efficacy and pursuing healthy lifestyle changes that improve their productivity and quality of life.

3. Care focused on whole health — physical, mental, and emotional health

In the APC model, providers do much more than treat immediate symptoms and refer people to specialty care. Instead, they offer whole-person care that takes patients’ unique circumstances, challenges, and needs into account. Active care coordination, where APC care teams seamlessly work together to develop care plans, also allows for a more connected experience. Care coordination also provides a high level of integration when specialist care is required, giving providers a deeper understanding of your employees’ histories and current health.

4. Clinically integrated health coaching

In the Vera APC model, Vera whole health coaches are clinically integrated into care teams, increasing access to behavior change support. Vera health coaches are rigorously trained and certified to help employees achieve healthy outcomes through behavior change.

Care services and plans that meet the needs of each employee

To improve health outcomes and reduce total cost of care, care must be convenient and easily accessed. Any APC model you consider must include these three items to support the high levels of engagement that drive the results you need:

1. Telehealth and virtual care:

Organizations with an increasingly dispersed workforce might benefit from a partner who can integrate telehealth and virtual care.

2. Dedicated or shared care center:

Organizations with a less dispersed workforce could see the greatest benefit from a dedicated or shared care center.

3. Worksite primary care:

The ideal solution for large enterprises might be to add a worksite primary care center to their campus so employees can access care just as easily as any other aspect of their jobs.