F005 How to make employees value health?

This year’s big question in healthcare is — can big corporations be the disruptors of the rigid and risk-averse healthcare industry?

Amazon partnered with JPMorgan Chase and Warren Buffett, Apple is designing medical clinics, and Uber wants to disrupt ambulances.

David Kliff, the diabetes industry expert, interviewed in episode 22 of the Medicine Today of Digital Health podcast, as this podcast was named before January 2018, marked the entrance of large corporation into healthcare as a promising potential for the industry. Apple, Google and Amazon have excellent knowledge about consumer habits and what engages them. Translating this knowledge into healthcare could bring a lot to medication and therapy adherence.

Free market and private healthcare have a lot to do with the high cost, as they give industry players a lot more freedom in the pricing of services and solutions compared to for example Europe. The second contributor to high costs in healthcare, in general, are inefficiencies. Healthcare has a lot of room and needs for optimization.

In the public systems, employees are less cost aware and feel more entitled to healthcare services and medicine. In the US, employers are the main payors of healthcare bills, prices of healthcare services are much more variable depending on where an individual seeks care. Consequently, the interest of employers to keep employees healthy is much higher than in many public systems. It is, therefore, no surprise that large companies are establishing doctors offices close to or inside the company, to give workers faster access to primary care which can significantly decrease complications and costs. We’ve been seeing new insurance models and business models turning payors into providers as a step towards efficiency and lowering cost in healthcare.

In the 5th episode of Faces of digital health Kathleen Harris, Vice President of Benefits at Time Warner, talks about how Time Warner, a global leader in media and entertainment with businesses in television networks and film and TV entertainment, is approaching employee health.

Time Warner has more than 25.000 employees around the globe, meaning that the company faces many different country-specific regulations when it comes to the health of employees, what programmes they can offer them and what kind of analysis they can do with the data of the employees.

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