According to this news story in the Sioux City Journal, it looks like by paying about 300 of its 415 employees to participate in annual health screenings, Sioux City, IA, was apparently able to save $645,000, or about $2150/participant, all in the first two years.
This is equivalent to avoiding all the Agency for Health Quality and Research’s “preventable admissions” for all the participants, plus all the non-participants, plus their spouses, plus about 1000 of their closest friends. Naturally nobody checked to see if a single preventable admission was avoided, or even made a list of preventable admissions that could be avoided through wellness. What fun would that be when you can simply attribute all the savings to the wellness program?
This item was also posted to a linkedin group by someone who wrote: “Proof that wellness works.” No doubt this was shorthand for: “Proof that people who point to this as proof that wellness works should not attempt to do proofs that wellness works.”
This is just one of the many, many case studies highlighted in Why Nobody Believes the Numbers demonstrating that, as far as healthcare cost reduction is concerned, the entire wellness industry is made up. Cracking Health Costs will burst this bubble altogether.
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Tom Emerick
Coming soon: Cracking Health Costs, the book, to be published by John Wiley & Sons. The authors are myself and Al Lewis. Click here to pre-reserve at a deeply discounted price.
Tom Emerick is the President of Emerick Consulting, LLC, and Partner and Chief Strategy Officer with Laurus Strategies, a Chicago-based consulting firm, and cofounder of Edison Health. Prior to starting his consulting career, Tom was with Walmart Stores, where his last position was Vice President, Global Benefit Design, which involved designing and managing benefits for over 1.3 million employees in the U.S., and 300,000 plus in international. For about six years, Tom also headed up Walmart’s Six Sigma and process improvement initiatives. Prior to Walmart, Tom had positions with Burger King Corporation, British Petroleum, and American Fidelity Assurance Company. In 2009, Tom was named by Healthspottr as one of the top 100 innovators in healthcare the US for his work on medical ethics. In December 2012, Tom was listed in Forbes.com as one of 13 unsung heroes changing healthcare forever.
Well, I thgink therer a lot of tall Tales here on all sides, including the reporter, who may have left off vital information that would allow a proper conclusion to be drawn. This is a large self-funded Account that has been self-insured for a number of years, and the reserves are growing, and growing at a rapid pace since 2009. I would suggest they are doing something right , and if they had the good presence, to have reinsurance, then it’s unlike ly one claim would have impacted the experience that much. I would guess there probably are several reaons why they continue to produce a suryplus.
but we’ll never know becasue they never bothered to track the rate of change in wellness-sensitive medical events before asserting that the improvement was due to wellness. I give these people an “F” for their understanding of health informatics and they should fire their consultant.
I think I know who the Consujltant is, most like ly he’s the Tpa. I haven’t dealt with them in years, but , if it’s the same people he’s pretty sharp.