2020 prediction: More human-centered health plans
Here are six principles employers and benefits advisors should consider as they create health plans that put patients first.
There comes a certain point in everyone’s life where the parent becomes the child, and the child their parent. I, like so many others, sadly experienced this firsthand with my father. He passed away last year from Parkinson’s disease.
Fortunately, my dad had insurance coverage that was high quality and supported good treatment. Unfortunately, too many others don’t—something I’ve spent many years working to improve.
Related: Your mom’s health insurance could help your kids
Now, the experience I had with my father has redoubled my commitment to help create health plans that put patients first. This is an aspiration shared by so many Americans, who continue to identify health care as the No. 1 issue they want addressed in the 2020 election. In light of that, I encourage benefits advisors to consider these principles this year:
1. Hire health professionals who want to, and have the freedom to, do good.
Health professionals have excellent intentions. They want to help people live happy, healthy lives, but in many instances, stifling health system administration makes it difficult. In our current fee-for-service world, many overburdened physicians are experiencing record levels of burnout and suicide. One study showed they were spending two hours on administration for every hour of patient care. Sadly, in flawed, volume-centric health systems they have been turned into glorified billing clerks.
Value-based physicians, who appeal to patients’ desire for accountability because they’re reimbursed according to the quality of their outcomes, have an increased ability to deliver high-quality, thorough and compassionate care. Therefore, value-based care models should be the ones benefits advisors seek out.
2. E-patients are smart but frustrated they can’t be healthier.
E stands for equipped, enabled and empowered. Technology is a powerful tool, and communication is even more powerful. By better leveraging the first, benefits advisors can help value-based physicians do more of the second, and ultimately have a more profound impact on their patients’ lives. Physicians can answer questions quickly via text, phone call, email or video chat, critical in situations where a loved one is acting as another’s caregiver.
3. Avoid waste.
Nearly half of spending on health care goes to waste. In other words, we are paying Cadillac prices for a Pinto health care system. The good news is that benefits advisors have the power to cut out unnecessary spending on issues like opioid prescriptions for lower back pain, where there is no evidence it is the most effective treatment. They can do that by investing in physical therapy, mental health and other such services not typically covered in status quo health plans.
4. Look local, as health starts at home.
Plan design should always optimize care to be delivered close to or in the home whether it’s supporting local, independent medical practices or providing tools for self-care, family caregivers and professional home care. Local public entities (towns, counties, school districts) can and must become market accelerators and bully pulpits for the relocalization of health because health care costs are intimately linked with all of these vital entities.
5. Trust is built through transparency and openness.
Trust makes people feel safe and secure, and the more transparent a benefits advisor is with their client, and their client with their beneficiaries, the better. When everyone is clued-in to how and why certain health plan changes are beneficial to all involved, they’ll be incentivized to see the change through.
6. Human-centered health plans restore health, hope and well-being.
The final thing benefits advisors will have to do to create a human-centered health plan is educate and empower beneficiaries to choose the option that’s best for them. Usually, they’ll pick the one that’s least invasive, but if it isn’t, a human-centered health plan will still allow them to make that choice with minimal limitations. Why? Because at the end of the day, the best health plan will protect and respect them and their freedom to choose.
Somewhere along the way, health care got so complicated that it became more of a monster than anything else. Now is the time to slay it, making health care about protecting the people it’s supposed to serve. Keeping these principles in mind—which shouldn’t be too hard to do considering the first letter of each spells out HEALTH—benefits advisors will do just that.
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