Healthcare on the Rocks - Employee Benefits with a Twist

In this second episode of a mini-series based on the 2022 Employee Health Trends report, we talk with co-author Janet Young, M.D., Lead Clinical Scientist at Springbuk, about the impacts COVID-19 has had on employee healthcare and employer benefit plans. 

Armed with data from more than 30,000 COVID patients, Janet and her fellow data analysts split the research into individuals who had COVID into hospitalized and non-hospitalized to get a better understanding of what was happening within each group.

Their findings were stunning: during a six-month period after an initial COVID diagnosis, hospitalized patients cost about 70% more than the researchers expected. Even non-hospitalized patients saw an increase of about 25%.

What’s this mean for employee benefit plans? As the pandemic seems to be drawing to an end, employers need to be mindful that doesn’t mean their healthcare costs will immediately drop. 

And besides the costs for acute care, the data show many people, unsurprisingly, have post-acute care mental health issues that may linger for an extended time. 

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!

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In the 2021 Employee Health Trends report, Springbuk discovered the rate of telemedicine services per 1000 plan members had increased 12-fold over the previous year’s data, which was mostly prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Digging deeper into the data, Chris Gagen and the rest of the Springbuk analytics team found mental health accounted for more than 40 percent of those encounters.

What has happened in the year since then? 

• Have telemedicine visits overall increased, decreased, or remained relatively constant?
• What about telemental health services? Has the long two-year grind of the pandemic caused more people to seek care via the internet?
• Who is using the services most?
• What’s causing the variance in telemedicine visits among demographic groups?

Those are some of the topics that Chris, Springbuk’s Senior Director of Analytic & Strategic Consulting, explains in this episode.

• Connect with Chris 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!

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You might know Spencer Smith hosts a popular podcast around self-funded insurance. Or you may have seen his video series on stop-loss insurance, which has become standard curriculum for many people just starting in the industry. 

But did you know Spencer loves heavy metal, which many people find shocking? Or that he once dabbled in stand-up comedy, where he occasionally bombed on stage, “which is just brutal to your soul.” 

Listen to him describe how he used that feeling of “being vulnerable on stage in front of 200 people and totally sucking” to build his confidence. 

In this wide-ranging conversation, Spencer encourages those who are struggling with self-confidence to “learn how to be comfortable being uncomfortable.” And he explains how one question — Are you a runner or a chaser? — can help you reframe your challenges and turn them into a personal guide to success. Finally, he describes the important lesson he learned from coaching his daughter’s youth soccer team: why you don’t need a shirt that says “Coach.”

• Connect with Spencer on LinkedIn
• Listen to “Self-Funded with Spencer” podcast
• Watch Spencer’s Stop-Loss Insurance videos on YouTube
• Learn more about the Springbuk Health Intelligence platform
• Connect with our co-hosts Jennifer Jones and Mike Pattengale 

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!

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Take a big idea, surround yourself with phenomenal people, and execute on an idea. 

That’s how Rod Reasen, CEO Springbuk, assessed the success he’s witnessed in the five years since founding the health data analytics company.

Rod believes benefits managers have a unique opportunity to take data from thousands of employers, use an analytics platform like Springbuk to apply rich health intelligence, and that will put them in position to move to true engagement between employers and individuals to improve health.

In this episode, Rod talks about his biggest surprises in moving to a totally remote “work-from-anywhere” workforce and the challenges for an entrepreneurial CEO in transitioning from a startup to a scale-up. “One of the hardest but most rewarding” experiences is learning to pass decisions off to other leaders, then watching them learn and grow.

From watching the healthcare industry for 20 years, Rod has observed an ebb and flow of vendors in the market. New vendors come in with a hyper-specialization, then over time as they become widely accepted, they branch out and become generalists. But one thing has remained constant. Listen to Rod explain what the constant is and why he’s excited about the opportunity around it.

Rod also explains the origin story of the name “Springbuk” and how happy he is with the choice over what it was initially called. 

• Connect with Rod on LinkedIn
• Learn more about the Springbuk Health Intelligence platform
• Connect with our co-hosts Jennifer Jones and Mike Pattengale 

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!

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Here in the middle of the “Great Resignation,” wellness programs play a huge role in attracting and retaining top employees. Courtney Schroeder, Well-being Strategy Consultant at WellRight, says the top question used to be “What is my bonus structure?” Now there’s been a shift back to “What is the culture?”

Standards are higher for perks and benefits, and people expect greater flexibility than ever before. Choice has become a primary factor in wellness programs: choice in incentives, activities that employees can join, and the ways they can interact with programs, such as websites, text messages, and video calls.

With 300 pre-built wellness challenges and more than 400 unique wellness activities in WellRight’s stable of offerings, Schroder’s role could be extraordinarily difficult. But she boils it down to understanding what is most important to the employer, asking questions such as: 

• What point solutions do they have?
• What role does financial well-being play?
• What kinds of in-person vs. virtual options are needed?
• How do you use social determinants of health to select programs and benefits?

Schroeder says data analytics, like those from Springbuk, help drive the direction of wellness programs, especially when considering how to use social determinants of health. She advises to start small - and gives tips on how to do that - so employers can gain some quick experience and direction.

Used effectively, data analytics can inform the strategy and dictate when a change is needed by setting benchmarks and monitoring the progress toward them.

• Connect with Courtney on LinkedIn
• Visit WellRight
• Learn more about the Springbuk Health Intelligence platform

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!

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In today’s dynamic labor market, it often takes more than a competitive salary and a solid medical plan to attract and retain the best employees. U-Haul, one of the Healthiest 100 employers in the United States, understands that better than most companies. 

Monique Harty, U-Haul’s Wellness Program Manager, explains that the 76-year-old do-it-yourself moving company views wellness as a holistic program with five components: 

• Health
• Mindset
• Fitness
• Nutrition     
• Financial Wellness

U-Haul provides programs and tools to help it’s 32,000 team members manage all five of those pieces. For example, U-Haul offers virtual and on-site counseling, legal advice, registered dietitians, financial planning and a shiny new family and fitness center at the corporate headquarters in Phoenix, which houses an on-site medical and dental clinic, as well as a gamut of live and simulated sports activities.

Listen in to hear Monique tell how wellness is thought about and promoted throughout the organization. Or just listen to hear which activities co-host Mike Pattengale is thinking of joining on his next visit to the U-Haul HQ - and why Monique has the waiver form ready!
 
Connect with Monique on LinkedIn

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!

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In today’s tight labor market, employers are struggling to identify the unique value proposition that they can offer to prospective employees as well as to retain current staff. For example, the importance of - and desire for - family benefits and mental health have risen dramatically over recent years.

Another set of hot-button questions for HR leaders revolves around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). What access to care do our employees have? How can we ensure our employee population is supported? Are our policies truly supportive to all our employees, including LGBTQ and every race and ethnicity? Is our pay equity in line? Who do we want to be as a company, culturally? 

In this episode, Megan Nail, CCP, SHRM-SCP, CEBS, SPHR-CA, shares her experience handling these challenging issues as Vice President of the Total Rewards Practice at First Person Advisors, now a subsidiary of NFP, and State Director for HR Indiana Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).

Megan advises clients on how to meet their organization’s goals through total rewards and compensation strategy. She builds and designs market-competitive base and incentive pay structures throughout the organization, including prioritizing compensation as a key component of the employee value proposition.

• Connect with Megan on LinkedIn 
• Listen to FirstPerson’s podcast, “Human Resolve”

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!

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In this episode, we talk with Jason Nordby, who is a senior account executive and partner at M3 Insurance, specializing in employee benefits and coordinating ongoing service for clients to ensure that their coverage meets their needs. Jason is also M3’s director of employee benefits captive practice. In this role, he serves as a subject matter expert, strategist, and thought leader on health captives agency-wide.

Jason explains how the healthcare system and the insurance world around it were “broken” as he started his career 27 years ago. He describes what benefits captives are and how they came into their own during the early days of Obamacare.

He says the introduction of employee benefits captives was the biggest twist he’s seen in his career. With this innovation, forward-thinking, data-driven employers could pool together with like-minded organizations to create stability for themselves as purchasers of healthcare insurance. 

Jason explains how captives allow organizations “to exit a dirty risk pool and enter into a cleaner pool” with other groups that are doing similar things to manage and mitigate risk. This affords employers the benefits of being self-funded while gaining access to more data so they can be more strategic. 

Lastly, we invite you to weigh in on the heated debate about who asked the better questions: Jennifer or Mike.

• Connect with Jason on LinkedIn
• Connect on LinkedIn with our hosts, Jennifer Jones and Mike Pattengale

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!

Produced by David Pittman
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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!

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In “Healthcare on the Rocks - Employee Benefits with a Twist,” we talk with employers, benefits advisors, technology innovators, and other experts in wellness, human resources, and healthcare.

Our first guest is Scott McGohan, CEO of McGohan Brabender, one of the largest independent health insurance brokers in the Midwest with offices in Dayton, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis. Scott works on vision casting, strategy alignment, and leadership deployment. His professional philosophy is that, as a business leader, it is always about the people. Products are delivered by people, and when people believe in themselves they will believe in you. 

Scott describes himself as “probably a Pollyanna, maybe a unicorn. Definitely an eternal optimist.” He describes the healthcare industry as “a gigantic, epic battleship, and to turn this thing is hard work,” but he believes that together, we can make a massive change in the evolution of the healthcare industry.

Like most advisors, McGohan Brabender was great at looking at reports and seeing what had happened. But they were not content with this mostly retroactive approach. They saw how they could use data to look forward to better guide their clients.

Hear Scott describe how people react when they learn he changed careers from his beginnings as a diamond salesman to settling down into a 30+ year career in insurance. And listen as he shares the values that drive him and, by extension, the culture of McGohan Brabender.

Finally, discover why people run from Scott on Thursdays - but why others flock to his social media posts on those days.

• Connect with Scott on LinkedIn
• Connect on LinkedIn with our hosts, Jennifer Jones and Mike Pattengale
• Listen to McGohan Bradender’s “Side Affects Podcast”
• Read “The Simple Truths of Service: Inspired by Johnny the Bagger” 

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!

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