Healthcare Cost-Containment Strategies: What are they?

Posted by Diane Smith on March 26th, 2019

Cost-containment strategies refers to the business practice of maintaining expense levels in order to prevent unnecessary expenditures or thoughtfully cutting down on expenses to enhance profitability without posing any long-term damage to the company.

Why is Cost-Containment doing Rounds for HR and Healthcare?

Skyrocketing healthcare costs have created a market for the technology solutions to tackle the increased expenses for employers. By introducing health technologies in all markets, the objective is to not only boost cost savings, but also augment access and increase transparency. The only drawback is that the actual consumers of healthcare, the patients, face a hard time understanding when, where and how they should be executing new technologies to help them in informed decision making. Or, in other words, engagement with the new technologies is quite low.

What is the Key to Cost Containment?

Triggering engagement is the key to creating the actual value for the employer and employees in new health care cost containment strategies. Now this can be quite difficult in as changing behavior on how exactly to make decisions and access care is quite hard. Let us now check out some of the health cost-containment strategies for employers:

• Transparency in Price

Let us consider employee, employer and the insurance company and their relationships:

• A to B- Employee to Employer
• A to C- Employee to Insurance Company
• B to C- Employer to Insurance Company

Each of these relationships has a complex structure that largely depends on other relationships and comprises of negotiated rates and discounts that are easy to understand. Therefore, this triangular relationship gets complex pretty quickly.

• Telemedicine

Virtual care is not new; rather it has recently emerged out as a big player in the benefits world. With rising health insurance premiums, employers have shifted much of their cost burden to their employees. But here, telemedicine is an effective solution that can help cut down costs for both the employers and employees by avoiding claims. On-call physicians’ service can help patients within minutes, thus avoiding the costs involved with doctor office appointments. Therefore, if people will not use the service; little healthcare cost savings are realized.

• Population Health Management

Big Data has stretches its claws to healthcare in population health management programs. Such programs focus on the demographic and claims data to assist companies tackle the skyrocketing costs of treating chronic illnesses like diabetes, heart problems and hypertension. Moreover, they can also inform you on case management strategies for the serious conditions that originate from those major health issues.

Remember, effective healthcare cost containment strategies originates from providing benefit that is utilized by both the employees and employers. And employee engagement together with cost-containment strategies will surely drive you better results.