Lee Lewis of the Health Transformation Alliance shares three ways employers cut insurance costs: use claims data to drive decisions, simplify plans so employees understand their benefits, and ensure primary care access so employers can manage referrals and downstream costs. These Fortune 100 practices work for smaller employers too.
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Hello, everyone. I am here with friend and industry thought leader Lee Lewis. Lee is the Chief Strategy Officer and General manager of Medical with the hta, the Health Transformation Alliance. So I wanted to ask Lee a couple questions about health care and health insurance. And if you're an employer out there listening in, some of what Lee is going to say can really help you impact the cost of your plan. So, Lee, you're working with companies working way up at the Fortune 100 level, right? What are some of the things you're doing with those employers in that space?
So a few things that we're working very carefully on is thinking about where we are consuming healthcare. If we can control where we're going, we can start to influence the cost, the quality and the user experience of being able to access healthcare. And then in addition to that, is thinking about how we engage physicians, how do we get better and more direct relationships between the patient and the doctor, as well as making it easy and efficient to administer a big health plan across potentially hundreds of thousands of people. Finally, we're thinking about health equality, which is getting everybody the same outcomes, no matter where you live, what you look like, or how much money you make.
So you're getting a really good perspective. Obviously working at a very high level with big companies, Fortune 100, so you get a good picture of what's going on industry wide next three, four years. If you're an employer right now in this country, whether you're a Fortune 100, mid sized company, small business, when it comes to health insurance, healthcare, what are some of the changes or things they need to be keeping a pulse on as we move forward?
I think things that you should be looking at are how are you using data, are you getting it, and how are you storing it and analyzing it so that you can get the right insights to be able to make good decisions for your population. Second thing I would say is thinking about how you're administering your plan. If you could pull any one person out of your sort of employee base and ask them to define the word coinsurance, most employers would find that fewer than 10% of your people could accurately describe what that is. Yet it affects every single person. It's the cause of a lot of balance, bills and other confusion. Try experimenting to make simple plans that people can understand and then getting control over the care and being able to understand where quality exists.
Okay, awesome. Awesome. All right, last question. I know you're busy, so want to get running. I'm an employer watching this video right now and I'm going, lee, I Get it? You're working up here with the Fortune 100 names we all recognize. Right. They can do whatever they want. I'm an employer with 150, 300 employees. What's a principle that you're practicing up here that an employer here with 150 or 300 employees could apply? Awesome.
If you're an employer and you're thinking about, what can I do that would be most impactful on my population, I think the simplest answer to that question is to answer this one, if my employees get sick, where should they go? That's a question that you should be able to answer. Because if you know where your primary care access points are for your members and your hopefully you've got a direct contract with them, or at least you know where they're going, you can then start to look downstream at all the other areas. You know that you've got access. You know that your members will be taken care of. You can start to investigate where they might get referred and have a good understanding of what your supply chain might be. And it can solve a whole host of other problems. But that is the first question that I would focus on.
Awesome. You heard it, guys. He is working with some of the biggest companies in America. But the funny thing is, a lot of the things he's implementing, principles he's applying, you with 50, 100, 150, 500 employees can apply as well. So take the time, focus on where your people are going, focus on your claims. Because if you can get your claims in control, you inherently get your cost in control. So that's it for now. Lee, appreciate it.
