Trinity Takes Positive Steps to Curtail Rising Health Costs

When Trinity Medical Center CEO Vicki Briggs moved to Birmingham from Longview, Texas, two years ago, she not only brought along her years of experience in hospital administration, but also some tried-and-true concepts for helping Trinity fulfill its mission of service. One of her first orders of business at Trinity was to institute a program called Workforce Health, an initiative that establishes win-win-win relationships among employers, employees and the hospital. “It was extremely successful there (in Longview),” said Briggs, “so when I came to Birmingham in July 2005, we started it here.” Entering its third year at Trinity, Workforce Health is currently being used by 45 area employers, collectively representing tens of thousands of employees. The program serves employers by helping them identify health-related problems and risks within their employee ranks, thus allowing employers to take steps toward keeping employees healthy and safe. This kind of proactive approach by employers, said Briggs, benefits employees by connecting them with resources for dealing with existing and potential health problems. And as employee health improves, absenteeism is reduced, productivity rises and health insurance premiums are less likely to skyrocket. But employers and employees aren’t the only ones to benefit, according to Briggs. Not only does Workforce Health place potential new patients in Trinity’s orbit, but it also provides the hospital with valuable feedback that helps to identify the programs and services that are most needed. Thus, the program is instrumental in improving the overall health of the community. “It’s actually one of my favorite programs because it’s done so much good,” Briggs said. “It really is a positive way to help.” To assist with implementing the Workforce Health approach, Trinity has contracted with Nashville-based Aegis Marketing Group, Inc., a company that develops marketing plans for hospitals across the United States. “We provide the tools and strategies,” said Aegis CEO Henry Ross. “My company works with the hospital in trying to get them into a position so that they can take a leadership role in helping employers deal with rising healthcare costs.” As employers struggle to keep healthcare benefits in place, Ross pointed out, they have tried either restructuring benefits or passing along some of the costs to their employees or both. In his opinion, however, such measures are no longer viable solutions for either party. “I think we’re at the end of the line there,” he said. Instead, Ross believes, proactive approaches like Workforce Health make more sense and that employers need to be taking a look at and dealing with the underlying causes of rising health costs. The Workforce concept, he said, is relatively simple. Each employee fills out a confidential Personal Health Profile at a health screening or wellness event sponsored by the hospital. Employees who complete the survey are later provided with Personal Health Report booklets that detail their screening results and provide an analysis of their current health characteristics and family medical history. The report encourages employees to share the information with their physicians and to discuss any highlighted items in the booklet. Personal Health Reports are held in the strictest confidence, so employees can be certain that personal information is not shared. “The information belongs to the hospital and is treated like any other medical records,” said Ross. “We don’t share the individual results with the employer or anybody else.” What Aegis does do is create an aggregate report that reveals the overall health complexion of an employer’s workforce. Those results are then compared to local and national averages to produce a reading for the health risks in that particular employer’s environment. Workforce obviously takes a wellness approach and Ross said that wellness approaches are not new. But wellness programs, he believes, have not caught on for a couple of reasons. “The dollars (health insurance costs) weren’t big enough before,” he said. “But the dollars have grown larger and are having an effect on companies’ profitability. And most wellness programs have taken a shotgun approach. We don’t want to take a shotgun approach.” Programs like Workforce Health, he explained, are more focused on individual employer and employee needs. The good news for employers is that the hospital underwrites the basic costs. Even though Aegis has been in business for 18 years, its success with marketing programs like Workforce Health is fairly recent and has come about in response to rapidly rising costs of health care. “In the last three to four years,” said Ross, “we’ve seen a real groundswell of employers waking up and seeing a need to do something different.” July 2007