How Can Advanced Primary Care Help My Business?

The traditional health care model can be hard to access, tough to navigate, and unnecessarily expensive. But there’s another way you can approach primary health care that makes your employees healthier and helps with your bottom line — advanced primary care.

Different, Better Care

When people’s health concerns are confined to rigid appointment times, often scheduled weeks in advance, and their doctor only sees them for 10 minutes at a time, it’s hard for patients to paint the whole picture about those concerns. In fact, 85% of doctors say they lack time during appointments to meet their patient’s needs. This shortage of time can cause doctors to over-test, which costs the patient more time and money, or they can misdiagnose or overprescribe, impacting the patient’s health.

On the other hand, with advanced primary care, patients enjoy more time with their care provider, see them more quickly, and may spend less time traveling to appointments.

When patients have the freedom to schedule appointments at flexible times and see their providers either in person or online, they are more likely to seek care at a clinic rather than urgent care or the emergency room.

Smarter Referrals

Advanced primary care can handle most of the health care needed, but there are times when care does need to be referred outside of the clinic. In those cases, an advanced primary care provider will guide a patient to lower cost, higher quality options and stay connected with the patient throughout the outside appointment. This gives patients access to an advocate through the health care process versus being lost in the system on their own.

In this model, providers have more time and resources to provide better care, the patient receives more convenient care for less money, and the employer saves on their overall health care costs. Everybody wins.

How Can I Access Advanced Primary Care?

• On Site Clinics are located at a single employer’s worksite for use primarily by their employees only.
• Shared-Site Clinics are located at a community site and are available for use by employees and families from multiple employers.
• Specialized health care providers can have the structure in place to provide advanced primary care to the community.

The Four Best Benefits

There’s no shortage of perks for offering advanced primary care to your employees and their families, but here’s our top four:

1) Employers can see their overall cost of health care lower by as much as 15-30%, with savings beginning in as little as 12 months. (In 2014, Brakebush Brothers opened an on-site clinic. Today, their health care costs are less than what they were in 2014.)

2) Employers don’t need to make the hard choice of increasing cost-share to employees in order to control health care utilization. With employers paying for the cost of accessing the clinic, there are no concerns about over-utilization of the services. Also, the use of urgent care and the emergency room goes down when patients have the option of advanced primary care due to the ease of access and reduced costs.

3) Recruiting and retaining employees can be made easier by offering access to advanced primary care at no cost to employees.

4) Referrals to lower-cost, higher-value specialists and procedures extends the value of the advanced primary care, even for care that happens outside the clinic.

For more information on how we can help you offer this to your employees, contact the Member Services team.