By MICHAEL TURPIN

As health reform continues to play out across state legislatures and within Washington, employers continue to wrestle with rising costs and the corrosive effects of skyrocketing medical trends. It’s clear that there is enormous variability among employers in their confidence and abilities to identify, mitigate and manage the complexities of the employer sponsored healthcare delivery system.

Many industry pricing and billing practices are opaque. Employers are not always getting good advice and often have to entrust the management and control of employee benefit plans to generalists who do not have the time, resources or ability to engage in managing a corporate expense that has eclipsed a composite average of $11,000 per covered employee.

If employer sponsored healthcare is going to survive to drive market based changes that cut fraud, waste and insist on personal health improvement, corporate decision makers must improve their Medical Quotient (MQ). While larger employers such as Safeway have begun to reap the dividends of lower costs by driving employee health improvement and employee engagement through prevention and chronic illness management, small and mid-sized businesses are increasingly getting failing scores for understanding and managing their own cost drivers.

Success in managing medical costs begins with understanding one’s own MQ and committing to improve it against a rapidly changing market that is exceeding the rate of change of many HR and financial professionals. Jack Welch once commented, “When the rate of change outside an organization exceeds the rate of change within, the end is near.” While ignorance can be bliss, it is an expensive consequence in employer sponsored healthcare. Can HR generalists and less engaged CFOs and CEOs finally grab the horns of their own population health costs and drive toward a healthier tomorrow?Continue reading…