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Focus on Benefits Management
A best-practices wellness program provides resources that help people both improve their health and make better healthcare decisions.
Benefits management resources — tools that support provider and hospital selection, medication and treatment cost analysis, and healthcare budgeting and plan choices — are key elements of a comprehensive wellness program. Wellness strategies that don't also address how people choose health plans, providers, drugs, and treatments miss opportunities to engage consumers in improving and managing their health. And for most organizations, wellness initiatives are motivated at least in part by efforts to reduce healthcare costs and to help people make more cost-effective health and healthcare choices.
We talked to Shannon Callaway, director of product management at WebMD Health Services, about effectively integrating benefits resources within wellness programs and engaging people to use them.
How do benefits management resources fit into a wellness program?
Benefits management resources should give employees and health plan members the full picture when it comes to decisions about their health. These resources can also allow companies to tie financial implications directly to health decisions. For instance, even though people generally know they should exercise or quit smoking, sometimes they need more than just encouragement or information from online health resources. They may be more likely to change their behavior if they have a financial incentive, such as a discounted gym membership or tobacco-free reduction in health premium. Wherever possible, companies hoping to engage people's interest should consider how they can tie their health and wellness initiatives directly to their benefits options.
But don't people only think about benefits a few times a year?
Perhaps, but that may be more often than they think about their health. That's another advantage to tightly integrating your health and benefits resources. Everyone has to deal with health benefits at least once a year during open enrollment and as they research their care options during the year. When you have their attention on these financial issues, you have a unique opportunity to engage them in an ongoing interaction about their health and healthcare. The more tightly integrated your benefits resources are to your health improvement programs, the more successful you can be at both managing your costs and improving your population's health.
What's the best way to integrate these programs?
Ideally you want consumers to understand the financial implications of their healthcare choices at the same time they are making them. That's why WebMD provides a comprehensive set of decision-support solutions.
When people log into the WebMD Health & Benefits Manager, they see the same framework and the same interface whether they're using our health improvement or decision-support applications. A single sign-on and password gives them access to the entire family of WebMD services. That familiarity and trust is important to their willingness to use the system.
Integration also makes the information they receive more personalized and relevant. A common example is an ongoing prescription that an individual has recorded in his personal health record. That prescription will automatically be pulled into the decision-support tools so that he can easily include information about his own specific healthcare use when making decisions for the next year. With complete information, he is better able to choose the right health plan for his situation, including his expected costs. And he can also access other relevant health resources within the same online framework should he have an interest in researching options for medications, specialists, or treatments.
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