“Finding those points where there’s common ground is where you can really make some progress.”
Kaufman Hall: What is your system’s most innovative program today?
David Blom: Our employer services division has been around for almost 20 years, but our vision for the program is truly coming to fruition today.
Over the years, employers in central Ohio have looked for help with flu shots, wellness programs, educational materials, worker’s comp management, onsite clinics, and similar needs. We’ve had a group of people who have worked directly with over 1,000 employers in Central Ohio. Our relationship with those employers has evolved over the years as they have increasingly focused on their employees’ health and their health spend.
That is rapidly evolving now as a number of large employers in Central Ohio are setting up onsite fitness centers and onsite clinics. OhioHealth is managing those services for the employers. Many employers are also looking for help managing their health spend. So we are analyzing claims data for utilization patterns of their employees and beginning to design innovative arrangements to help these employers manage their health spend. We have modeled those initiatives with our own employee health plan. What we are proving through management of our own employee health plan can then be exported to other employers.
We haven’t had to set up a sales force to do this because of our strong, long-term relationships with roughly 1,000 employers in central Ohio. Also, our market has many large, self-funded employers. And this is the right time for OhioHealth. We’re in the process of pivoting as an organization to one where there is more focus on value-based care, and we are able to do that not only through governmental payers, but also through employers.
This is a natural evolution of our relationships through our employee services division. We are getting into population health: identifying the opportunities within a set of employees for the employer to incent those employees to adopt a different lifestyle, or we are identifying whether we can do something different with the care network. There will be some risk-bearing payment arrangements in this model once we have gone through the analytics with employers to see where the opportunities are.
A mindset change is required for a program like this to work. There’s a mindset change from maximizing a fee-for-service environment to one in which you’re trying to mitigate risk. There is also a mindset change for the employees, who now have more responsibility for their health spend. There is a mindset change on the part of the employer—a real commitment to their employees’ health, which comes through programs and services that allow employees to understand and modify their health. And this kind of program also requires a mindset change among physicians.
You’re not going to reform anything unless all parts of the equation are equally engaged in wanting to be reformed. That’s the hospital, the doctors, the employees, and the payer, which is ultimately the employer. They all have to want a similar thing. And finding those points where there’s common ground is where you can really make some progress.
David Blom is President and Chief Executive Officer of OhioHealth.