With health care costs and outcomes so difficult to control – from the workplace to halls of Congress – it stands to reason that employers will achieve better results if they’re able to remove any distractions when designing and managing their benefit programs.

Lisa Fry, vice president of sales and client services for Avivia Health From Kaiser Permanente, recommends purchasing employee wellness and disease management programs separately from the traditional employee benefit purchasing cycle. Another key component of this approach is to pursue an off-cycle enrollment.

The buying cycle takes at least 90 days, though senior-level managers seeking to tether these benefit offerings to the bottom line often times increase that time frame. Between planning and implementation, she notes that the timeline could last anywhere from nine months to a year, or less time for highly motivated employers.

“I think there are a lot of advantages for purchasers to take their benefits strategy to a different level as part of an investment in human capital, as well as create a culture of health, to move away from treating benefits as a cost center,” Fry says. Buying specialized health management programs off cycle often supports this positioning.

Making the most of an off season

The trick is to avoid all the white noise associated with annual open-enrollment periods when employees are scrambling to make their benefit choices. She says organizations that fold wellness and disease management programs into this process run the risk of important messages getting lost in the clutter of other core and ancillary options.

An off-cycle enrollment allows for razor-sharp focus on the tools and resources being put in place. For example, it can help call greater attention to financial incentives and serve to further boost program participation. Many employers will raise their monthly health premium contribution or offer better benefits for employees who agree to fill out a health-risk assessment, which can be a challenge during the open enrollment rush. Fry notes that going off cycle enables program participants to reach incremental goals throughout the year in a way that doesn’t compete with other benefit offerings.

While many off-cycle periods take place in the spring, wellness and disease management programs can be rolled out on the first of the year just after open-enrollment season to coincide with proverbial new-year resolutions about improving one’s health.

How to select the right vendor

Fry says employers need to select a vendor that will be creative and knowledgeable about engaging employees in these programs in a meaningful enough manner during off-peak enrollment months.

Another consideration is that there’s a level of sophistication about population health management and segmenting the employee population for the right interventions. “The outreach you need to engage someone who has a weight-management problem might be different than, for example, a case management support needs,” according to Fry.

It’s also imperative that the service provider be clear about delivering credible health outcomes and results, which she says is a common complaint. That means providing “the analytical rigor underneath their reporting processes,” she explains, including flexible performance guarantees in program contracts. “You want to be leery of vendors who deliver semi-outrageous claims in terms of ROI, think about how they arrived at that number and look at sample reports.”

Personalized coaching

From a human standpoint, vendors should offer a personalized health coaching model rather than randomly route program participants to a call-center representative who has no personal stake in the outcome. When employees are assigned to a certain individual, so the theory goes, they feel more motivated and a sense of obligation to do their best.

Avivia Health uses socio-demographic information about its members to tailor communications so that, for instance, families might be featured in photos on materials meant for suburbanites, whereas a single person who’s active might be receive materials depicting active urban-dwellers.

Fry says program integration and clinical expertise will help determine which interventions work based on an analysis of claims data, risk factors and a population health management approach that’s tailored to each employee’s specific needs. Avivia Health is able to leverage 60 years of evidence-based care from its parent company, Kaiser Permanente – offering a powerful partnership for devising wellness and disease management solutions for employers.

Finally, boutique providers with deep expertise clearly offer a superior model to large carriers that bundle their services. “The advantage is you’re working with somebody who spends all their time thinking about cutting-edge health management programs as their core business versus carving it into their health plan which is more concerned with administering a set of insurance benefits,” she notes. “If you go with a carve-in provider through the health plan you’re working with, most of the time you get a pretty standardized, vanilla off-the-shelf solution lumped in with 50 other employers that can’t be branded, and you may not get a fair share of the pooled resources.”

Avivia Health From Kaiser Permanente www.aviviahealth.com 888.4AVIVIA (888.428.4842) info@aviviahealth.com