How Preventive Care Management Can Lower Costs and Head Off Future Claims

APRIL 4, 2023

Promoting preventive care helps improve overall population health, significantly reducing long-term costs and the impact of catastrophic claims on employer health plans. Serious conditions like heart disease, diabetes and cancer can require complex and often expensive care – yet these conditions can be managed, and even prevented, if detected early. Employers looking to proactively manage healthcare costs must identify the undiagnosed or unmanaged conditions that are most likely to become future cost drivers while the costs to intervene are low.

Employers need data to understand their health plan trends, yet much of the reporting currently available is short-sighted. Traditional wellness program reporting focuses on measuring activities and participation rates without providing any meaningful analysis. Usually relying on one or two years’ worth of data, wellness reporting misses long-term trends in health outcomes and/or financial impact. To fully understand your exposures and implement preventative measures, health plan reporting needs to be much more predictive.

USI’s ability to use your own healthcare data to determine your organization’s future claims exposure allows our consultants to create low-cost, high-impact solutions designed to improve your population’s health status and reduce the impact of large claims.

USI’s CORE Health Strategy Approach

Since 2012, USI’s CORE Health Strategy has helped employers reduce the cost of healthcare by promoting preventive care and targeted disease management, reducing the likelihood and severity of catastrophic claims. Using the claims experience of more than 1,400 clients and 2.3 million plan members, we’ve been able to demonstrate the impact of preventive care and diagnostic testing, and prove the value of our approach, which has:

• Increased early detection of potentially high-cost claimants, improving health outcomes and reducing costs.
• Reduced non-urgent emergency room visits by 40%.
• Reduced in-patient hospital stays by 33%.
• Helped clients save 3% to 5% on annual healthcare premiums.

Our long-term focus on the CORE Health Strategy has created opportunities to benchmark client data and identify top-quartile performance metrics for several high-cost areas like cancer care and diabetes management. USI sets those performance metrics as targets for health plan improvements in our new CORE Health Action Plan (CHAP) report.