By Allison Binning
As businesses evolve and grow, their needs and goals change. This growth often necessitates re-evaluating current vendors to ensure they can meet the demands and expectations of the organization. Where onsite healthcare vendors are concerned, this is particularly relevant as continually rising healthcare costs coupled with variable care quality often result in employers facing daunting obstacles in providing the best possible healthcare solutions for their employers.
In addition, the process of evaluating and switching onsite healthcare vendors can be complex and time-consuming. A tedious task, healthcare vendor evaluation involves scrutinizing current services, comparing potential vendors, and making decisions that will impact both the health of your employees and your company's bottom line. To aid this process, we’ve identified three key considerations for employers looking to switch onsite healthcare vendors. These factors will help guide you on your journey, ensuring you partner with a vendor that aligns with your company's needs and goals while also offering superior healthcare solutions to your employees. Let's delve into these factors!
1. Identifying the Issues and Seeking Effective Solutions
In the ever-evolving healthcare vendor landscape, employers often find themselves grappling with a multitude of challenges. Rising healthcare costs, diminishing care quality, and the increasing financial burden placed on employers are just a few of the pressing issues they face. Additionally, employers face unforeseen vendor struggles such as a change in service levels, staffing turnovers, subpar vendor innovation, or an unexpected change in vendor ownership. When existing healthcare vendors fail to meet expectations or fall short in addressing these concerns, it becomes imperative to seek effective solutions by selecting the right vendor.
Enter Proactive MD, an Advanced Primary Care vendor committed to providing a total healthcare solution for employers. Proactive MD recognizes the overwhelming need for a comprehensive approach and have designed their services accordingly. With their Health Centers practicing Advanced Primary Care, Proactive MD strives to meet each employee's unique mental, emotional, social, and physical needs. By placing a strong emphasis on establishing strong provider-patient relationships and deploying onsite Patient Advocates, patients experience healthcare that is individualized, supportive, and engaging.
Moreover, Proactive MD's model extends beyond primary care to offer reduced-rate access to the nation's leading specialists for complex and catastrophic diagnoses. This comprehensive approach not only improves the quality of care for employees but also yields cost reductions for employers. By addressing the core issues plaguing the healthcare industry, Proactive MD stands out as a vendor dedicated to revolutionizing the healthcare experience for the better.
When considering a switch to a new healthcare vendor, employers must confront the challenges prevalent in the industry. By acknowledging the rising costs, declining care quality, and the financial strain imposed on employers, they can take the crucial step of seeking effective solutions. Proactive MD offers a transformative approach that prioritizes comprehensive care, builds strong provider-patient relationships, and mitigates healthcare costs. By partnering with Proactive MD, employers can address these pressing issues head-on and forge a path towards improved healthcare outcomes for their employees.
2. Knowing Who They Serve and Their Company Ethos
Proactive MD primarily caters to self-funded businesses with at least 500 employees in a single geographical location, partnering with employers across the nation in various sectors such as education, manufacturing, municipalities, and technology. Their ethos revolves around reuniting the patient with the provider, driving down healthcare costs, and revolutionizing healthcare for the better. Their mission, vision, passion, and values align perfectly with these goals, promising to always fight for the patient's greatest good. Why is this important? Because during vendor evaluation, it’s crucial to understand the vendor’s typical client demographic and whether your organization aligns with their vision. Let's further explore the reasons why an understanding of each vendor’s audience and ethos is paramount.
Alignment of Values: Working with a vendor who shares your organization's values fosters a fruitful and collaborative partnership, enabling you to work towards a shared vision of improving healthcare outcomes.
Understanding Specific Needs: Vendors who understand the challenges and needs of their unique customer base can provide tailored solutions. Proactive MD specializes in serving self-funded businesses looking to improve health outcomes for their employee population in a cost-contained manner, ensuring they comprehend the complexities of managing healthcare for large organizations.
Consistency in Approach: An aligned ethos between your organization and the vendor creates a cohesive healthcare strategy. Proactive MD's focus on reuniting the patient with the provider, driving down costs, and revolutionizing healthcare ensures a united front in transforming the industry.
Patient-Centered Care: Choosing a vendor that prioritizes patient-centered care, like Proactive MD, leads to personalized, comprehensive solutions. With a commitment to building strong provider-patient relationships and offering onsite Patient Advocates, they put patients at the center of their model, resulting in higher engagement and better health outcomes.
Evaluating the client base and company ethos of a healthcare vendor ensures that you choose a partner who not only understands your organization's unique needs but also shares your vision for enhancing healthcare delivery. By selecting a vendor like Proactive MD, who aligns with your values and focuses on patient-centered care, you set the stage for a successful partnership that benefits both your employees and your organization as a whole.
3. Understanding What Sets Them Apart
Every vendor has their unique selling points. When switching, you must analyze these differentiators closely to decide which differentiators resonate with you the most. Proactive MD, for instance, offers several distinguishing features:
- Flexible and Agile: As a privately held company, they offer flexibility and responsiveness in their partnerships. With no investment groups or health systems to answer to, Proactive MD’s incentives are directly aligned with their employer partners.
- Data-Driven: Their approach is guided by each employer partner’s historical clinical data, using it to develop targeted Health Center strategies focused on issues identified in the claims data.
- Onsite Patient Advocate: Core to their model, this licensed social worker provides crucial mental health support, personalized care guidance, patient outreach and engagement, healthcare literacy support, and more.
- Patient-Centered: They prioritize the patient's well-being, providing personalized, concierge-style healthcare grounded in value-based primary care.
- Pricing Model: They utilize a unique comprehensive fixed fee model for all professional services where over 95% of the Health Center cost is set.
- Performance Guarantees: Proactive MD is unique in that they offer performance guarantees on total service fees, one of the few in the industry to do so.
Switching Vendors: When and Why?
Though not a hard and fast rule, vendor transitions often coincide with year-end review planning and annual benefits strategy formulation so it’s never too early to start re-evaluating your vendor stack. Along with the above considerations, other factors to take into consideration may include potential misalignment of incentives due to industry consolidation, the need for predictable budgeting through a comprehensive fixed fee model, or dissatisfaction with current service standards.
Although switching vendors can be a daunting task, it's an essential step in improving the healthcare experience for your employees while containing your healthcare costs. At Proactive MD, they aim to make vendor transitions smooth by providing a dedicated vendor transition team to ensure every need is meet and transitions are seamless. By focusing on the key considerations outlined above and partnering with a vendor like Proactive MD, you can create a positive impact on your employees’ health and your organization’s bottom line.
We are proud to feature Proactive MD on The Granite List.
