As HR professionals are well aware, it’s difficult finding quality healthcare benefits that can keep a company competitive. One issue is that many solutions are fragmented across multiple providers, which makes it challenging for employees to navigate and hard for HR to provide complete 360 care. Of course, times of uncertainty and increased concern over health and safety—as the world is experiencing today—can escalate these issues of confusion and complexity exponentially.
Integrated care—a solution that brings all elements of care together under one roof—appears to be the answer. Eden Health recently hosted a webinar on this topic entitled “Integrated 360 Care: Why it’s necessary in challenging times.” As we discuss in the webinar, you can use certain benchmarks to help you find high-quality integrated 360 care.
To get you started, here are three critical criteria that any good integrated-care provider must offer.
1) A consistent care team for each employee. By “care team,” we mean a cross-functional group of clinicians to care for a specific patient. This might include a primary-care doctor, 2-3 advanced-practice clinicians, 1-2 insurance navigators, and a mental health clinician. (A care team should be large enough to guarantee convenience, yet small enough to allow personalization and trust.) Familiarity with each of the care team members, who will be consistent from visit to visit, allows the patient to feel comfortable with the team and confident in their own care. These team members should be available to the patient both on the provider’s telehealth app and at in-office medical visits.
2) Integrated data to give your team insight into employee usage. The provider should be able to provide regular metrics to help you understand how employees are actually using the various services that they offer. This data can help answer several significant questions, such as: How many employees are even using the services? Are they encountering any problems in using it? What services are they requesting that aren’t offered? What usage patterns indicate greater problems within your workplace? To offer truly integrated care, a provider should be able to provide you with answers to all these questions and more.
3) Active monitoring of employees’ physical symptoms and mental well-being. To ensure a safe working environment for on-site employees in the face of the global COVID-19 pandemic, it’s essential your company is able to monitor the health of each worker. The provider’s plan should cover four distinct areas of concern. First, they should act as an information resource for employees regarding preventative measures and be able to answer questions. Second, they should offer temperature verification, to check the vital signs of employees even before they leave for work. Third, they should supply a risk screener questionnaire for employees to complete daily. Fourth, offer a comprehensive back-to-work program that includes COVID-19 screening, PCR testing, and onsite antibody testing. Lastly,they should provide mental health screening to make sure all employees are coping adequately with the stress and anxiety related to the outbreak.
We hope these tools are useful to you in your ongoing search for quality healthcare for your employees.
