Healthcare on the Rocks - Employee Benefits with a Twist

If you look at almost any engagement survey that a company does, career development is almost always one of the lowest scores. Robyn Clark, the founder of WinningWise, an HR and talent management company, says that’s largely because employers career development because they think it's only for the person – the employee – and not for them. That’s completely and utterly wrong.

Robyn explains that if employers are preparing a workforce for the future, they should be looking to develop people so they can take on ever-bigger projects and go into broader roles, some of which may not even be known yet. 

Robyn further says career development is probably the most important talent strategy today, one that offers a huge win for both the organization and the individual because the employer is building the bench that they want and they're meeting two significant needs for the employee: mastery and personal growth.

Catch the full conversation.

• Connect with Robyn Clark on LinkedIn
• Watch WinningWise’s webinar “Understanding Individual Needs: How Employee Needs Have Shifted Since the Pandemic”
• Get the complete 2023 Employee Health Trends report and other related resources
• Connect with our co-hosts Jennifer Jones and Mike Pattengale 
• Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other popular podcast players. 

Have feedback, questions, or suggestions for show ideas? Send them to us at [email protected].

Please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform, and share it with your friends and colleagues. We appreciate you and thank you for listening!

Theme music: "Overboard" by Stay Outside

A 2023 Business Group on Health survey showed that for the first time in history, cancer overtook musculoskeletal disease as the top cost driver for employers. Natalya Gertsik, vice president of Clear Cancer Solution Management at PHM, and a contributor to the 2023 Springbuk Employee Health Trends report, says this is a major issue from employers and their employees because of three main deficiencies in our healthcare system related to cancer care:

• limited access
• inadequate communication
• inefficiency

She describes the respective underlying issues with Centers of Excellence and community-based oncologists, and then explains how PHM is applying an ”independence clinical excellence model” to address these deficiencies and challenges.

Catch the full conversation.

• Connect with Natalya Gertsik on LinkedIn
• Get the complete 2023 Employee Health Trends report and other related resources
• Connect with our co-hosts Jennifer Jones and Mike Pattengale 
• Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other popular podcast players. 

Have feedback, questions, or suggestions for show ideas? Send them to us at [email protected].

Please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform, and share it with your friends and colleagues. We appreciate you and thank you for listening!

Theme music: "Overboard" by Stay Outside

For the past few years, specialty drugs have played a large and growing role in the overall cost of employee healthcare. In this episode, Janet Young, M.D., lead clinical scientist and co-author of Springbuk's 2023 Employee Health Trends Report, describes the factors that are driving the biggest increases and get some tips on what employers can do to keep their costs under control. 

Catch the full conversation.

• Connect with Janet Young on LinkedIn
• Get the complete 2023 Employee Health Trends report and other related resources
• Connect with our co-hosts Jennifer Jones and Mike Pattengale 
• Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other popular podcast players. 

Have feedback, questions, or suggestions for show ideas? Send them to us at [email protected].

Please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform, and share it with your friends and colleagues. We appreciate you and thank you for listening!

Theme music: "Overboard" by Stay Outside

We are now into our fourth year of dealing with COVID. Since it burst into our consciousness in early 2020, we've seen massive changes in treatments and long-term effects, including the enigmatic, long COVID  and strains on mental health. To kick off season two of “Healthcare on the Rocks: Employee Benefits with a Twist,” we're going to start with a mini-series, exploring the major trends that are reshaping employee healthcare. 

This episode’s featured guests are three of the analysts and authors of Springbuk's 2023 Employee Health Trends Report. Janet Young, M.D., lead clinical scientist; Chris Gagen, senior director of analytic and strategic consulting; and Jennifer Jones, MSM RD, enterprise employer practice leader.

Catch the full conversation.

• Connect with Janet Young and Chris Gagen on LinkedIn
• Get the complete 2023 Employee Health Trends report and other related resources
• Connect with our co-hosts Jennifer Jones and Mike Pattengale 
• Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other popular podcast players. 

Have feedback, questions, or suggestions for show ideas? Send them to us at [email protected].

Please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform, and share it with your friends and colleagues. We appreciate you and thank you for listening!

Theme music: "Overboard" by Stay Outside

Imagine you’ve just received a life-changing diagnosis: maybe it’s cancer, maybe it’s ALS. Whatever it is, the last thing you would want to worry about is finding the best specialist or questioning if your prognosis is correct. 

That’s where an Expert Medical Opinion solution can help. Josh Reimer, Director of Channel Partnerships at Included Health, joined us to review many of the challenges of our current healthcare system:

• Confusion: 50% of individuals struggle to understand their insurance
• Low engagement: 33% of individuals avoid medical care altogether
• Lack of access: >16,000 physician offices closed due to COVID
• High costs: 30% of healthcare spend is considered waste

He then explained how an EMO solution can help break down those barriers to simplify the healthcare experience, delivering access to 4000  of the top clinical specialists and subspecialists nationwide.

Listen to the full conversation.

• Connect with Josh Reimer on LinkedIn
• Visit Included Health
• Connect with our co-hosts Jennifer Jones and David Pittman 
• Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other popular podcast players

Have feedback, questions, or suggestions for show ideas? Send them to us at [email protected].

Please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform, and share it with your friends and colleagues. We appreciate you and thank you for listening!

Theme music: "Overboard" by Stay Outside

“What we've seen in the last 10 to 15 years … is a juggernaut of costs from specialty medicines, usually wonderful medicines with great cures, but that come at a significant cost. … And whereas the split between medical and pharma used to be that we spent some of our time on utilization of pharmacy and prescriptions and generics and mail order versus retail, now specialty medicine is just blowing everything out of the water from a cost perspective.” 

With that, healthcare industry thought leader Dr. Ron Leopold launched into an engaging conversation about macro trends in employee benefits, covering the ever-evolving effects of COVID, the proliferation of point solutions, the major cost drivers for employers, and how those employers should be using data to contain their costs.

“There's a whole lot that we can measure if we're smart and understand this requires both looking at the data and then really thinking through cause and effect,” said Dr. Leopold.

Listen to the full conversation.

• Connect with Dr. Leopold on LinkedIn
• Visit RonLeopold.com
• Connect with our co-hosts Jennifer Jones and Mike Pattengale 
• Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other popular podcast players

Have feedback, questions, or suggestions for show ideas? Send them to us at [email protected].

Please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform, and share it with your friends and colleagues. We appreciate you and thank you for listening!

Theme music: "Overboard" by Stay Outside

The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 (CAA) was signed into law, including many provisions that impact employer-sponsored health plans. The CAA mandates a new set of requirements for pharmacy reporting, mental health parity compliance, consumer price transparency, balance-billing practices, and other requirements related to contracts between employers, their health plans, and broker/consultant partners.

It’s complex. Shannon Kukulka, an employee benefits attorney at Waller and former  in-house counsel for a Fortune 500 company, joined Nicole Belles, vice president of product at Springbuk, and regular host Jennifer Jones to share her legal knowledge and practical advice on how employers can navigate the murky waters of the CAA.

• Connect with Shannon on LinkedIn
• Visit Waller’s website
• Read Shannon’s blog about the CAA
• Connect with our co-hosts Jennifer Jones and Nicole Belles 
• Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other popular podcast players

Have feedback, questions, or suggestions for show ideas? Send them to us at [email protected].

Please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform, and share it with your friends and colleagues. We appreciate you and thank you for listening!

Theme music: "Overboard" by Stay Outside

Healthiest Employers is the trusted awards program that recognizes people-first organizations that are taking a more proactive approach to employee health. Since its inception in 2009, the Healthiest Employers corporate wellness program has attracted over 10,000 employers representing more than 60 million employees from all across the United States.

Haley Elmore, Healthiest Employers program coordinator, joined Jennifer and Mike to share several of the attributes found in organizations that were named in the Healthiest 100 Workplaces in America. She also explain why companies choose to apply for the program and the value they take away from participating, even if they don’t receive a regional or national award. HINT:  it’s learning from the best of the best.

Listen as Haley provides recommendations for both employers and their employees.

• Connect with Haley on LinkedIn
• Visit Healthiest Employers website
• Read the Healthiest Employers blog
• Get a Benchmark Report with more than 40 pages of data, charts, and recommendations
• Connect with our co-hosts Jennifer Jones and Mike Pattengale 
• Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other popular podcast players

Have feedback, questions, or suggestions for show ideas? Send them to us at [email protected].

Please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform, and share it with your friends and colleagues. We appreciate you and thank you for listening!

Theme music: "Overboard" by Stay Outside

Specialty drugs are playing a significant role in the increasing healthcare costs in the commercial market. In this third episode of a mini-series based on the 2022 Employee Health Trends report, Janet Young, M.D., Lead Clinical Scientist at Springbuk and co-author of the report, talks about which specialty drugs are driving the most cost and alternatives that benefits leaders can explore.

Discover why one condition has a relatively small percentage of people receiving a specialty drug, but that is still drive a large dollar value of spending, and hear which conditions our data scientists expect to drive growth of specialty drug use over the next couple of years.

Get tips for how employers can reduce costs on specialty drugs without reducing efficacy, including looking at where the drugs are administered. 

And learn the steps employers can take now to increase adoption of lower-cost alternative drugs and to ensure they are able to reap cost savings as new biosimilars come into the market over the next two to three years.

Listen as Janet provides recommendations for both employers and their employees.

• Connect with Janet on LinkedIn
• Get the complete 2022 Employee Health Trends report
• Connect with our co-hosts Jennifer Jones and Mike Pattengale 
• Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other popular podcast players

Have feedback, questions, or suggestions for show ideas? Send them to us at [email protected].

Please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform, and share it with your friends and colleagues. We appreciate you and thank you for listening!

Theme music: "Overboard" by Stay Outside

Health insurance was established to protect us from catastrophic financial loss, but David Contorno, CEO and founder of E-Powered Benefits, says, “medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the U.S., with the huge majority of them having had health insurance?”

David explains how the typical broker and carrier contracts are structured so that they benefit most when costs go up. His firm turns the usual system of incentives around so they’re paid on how much they lower costs. 

Learn about his firm’s approach to building benefit plans that are built specifically for a company’s culture and workforce … and discover why insurance carriers don’t like him much.

• Connect with David on LinkedIn
• David’s viral post about Health Expenditure vs. Life Expectancy
• Get the e-book Social Determinants of Health: A Springbuk Perspective
• Marshall Allen’s book, Never Pay the First Bill: And Other Ways to Fight the Health Care System and Win
• Get the complete 2022 Employee Health Trends report
• Connect with our co-hosts Jennifer Jones and Mike Pattengale 
• Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other popular podcast players.   

Have feedback, questions, or suggestions for show ideas? Send them to us at [email protected].

Please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform, and share it with your friends and colleagues. We appreciate you and thank you for listening!

Theme music: "Overboard" by Stay Outside