“Health Care Coaches” Improve Health, Cut Costs

From NPR, April 13, 2011

For the last five years, Marathon Health in Colchester has been advising large companies on how to contain health care costs. Part of the plan is assigning “health care coaches” to employees to develop individualized health care plans. By most accounts, this has been a very effective program.

VPR’s Lynne McCrea reports on Marathon’s work with Vermont’s Pizzagalli Construction.

Listen to the report:

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(Host) There are lots of pieces to health care overhaul – all designed to improve care and reduce costs.  Some of the ideas are still unproven – but others are in place and showing results.

For the last 5 years, one Colchester company has been working with larger businesses nationwide to improve employee health and save on health care spending.

VPR’s Lynne McCrea has this profile of Marathon Health.

(McCrea) To understand how Marathon Health works, we start with a visit to Pizzagalli Construction – a company that’s based in Vermont and has about 700 employees.

(Sessions at construction site “Hi guys!”)

(McCrea) Mike Sessions is Vice President of Pizzagalli. Four years ago, he began to study how well the company’s health care coverage was working, and he discovered some discouraging statistics.

(Sessions) “I learned that we had about 45% of our employees who had insurance had not used it in 2 years. I also learned that we had a very small percentage of employees that were about 80% of the cost of our total health care bill.”

(McCrea) Now, these two statistics are important to understand, because they reflect what’s happening across the nation.  Less than 1 percent of Pizzagalli’s employees – typically, people with severe or chronic conditions – accounted for 80 percent of the company’s health care spending. Could anything be done to reduce that spending?

Well, we’ll get back to this in a minute. It’s the other health care statistic that really bothered Mike Sessions:

(Sessions) “We had great coverage… 45 percent of the people weren’t using it at all-really, were not going to get a physical or doing anything, so they didn’t know what their health was. What we needed to do was to have those people begin to get engaged and to start thinking about their health and take responsibility for their own health.”

(McCrea) While it might seem good that people weren’t using their health insurance, what concerned Mike Sessions is that they weren’t getting any preventative care – no checkups for things like high cholesterol or blood pressure.

Continue reading this article on the VPR website.