Bringing leaders from all facets of the healthcare community together to find common solutions to complex issues is what the Hans Wiik Health Group does best.
Are you:
In need a comprehensive ROI analysis for a new quality-of-care or cost-reduction initiative?
Looking for help with strategic planning, leading focused retreats, or other structured workshops for your leadership groups?
Interested in creating trusted, decision-support clinical data?
Looking for EMR implementation, analytics, and productivity?
Considering shared data across the continuum of care?
Are you concerned about Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) development and success, clinical integration, population health management, and new models of healthcare delivery and coordination?
As a large or small employer, are you needing new solutions for creating a healthier workforce that is sustainable with proven results? That is, less sick days, more productivity, and lower claim costs?
Is value based benefit design part of your health plan discussion?
Are you tackling the increasing cost of drugs, with an emphasis on the specialty biologics for chronic disease and cancer?
The Hans Wiik Health Group is ready to respond.
As with the accountable healthcare model we champion, our consulting services expand and contract to meet our clients’ needs. The HWHG only partners with other consulting professionals and associations when their services add significant value to our clients — nothing more, nothing less. So whether you are a provider, employer, insurer, or third-party administrator (TPA), PBM, or another healthcare stakeholder, the Hans Wiik Health Group can tailor a program that meets your needs — and exceeds your expectations.
The Common Goal – a culture of health awareness and patient accountability thereby connecting health and healthcare
Sooner or later, we’re all patients.
Regardless of your social standing, wealth, knowledge, or genetics — illness, injury, and age reduce all of us to patients.
Since we all we end up in this category, we often begin our discussion with clients with this simple question:
What do patients want?
Like all human beings, patients want to be treated with dignity and respect. They want to be healed, cured, or fixed as quickly as possible for the least amount of money. Those objectives frequently run afoul in our current fee-for-service model of healthcare. The demand for convenience for all patients is one of the new drivers in healthcare. Enhancing patient satisfaction is quickly becoming a critical element in clinical care. Successfully navigating an increasingly “siloed” and fragmented healthcare system is a common need for all patients.
Understanding and maintaining our own personal health, supported by new resources and tools, are also part of everyone’s individual life journey. Employers can and should design and support these new tools for promoting an employee culture of health and wellness.
How will providers — and the employer community — respond to these new demands?
As you can see, our original question quickly evolves into: How do we move from a healthcare volume model that rewards extensive testing and expensive treatments to a healthcare value model that encourages prevention and proactive care to improve community health and wellness?
If we could get people to be as competitive about their health and wellness as they are about their frequent flyer miles — that would be a big step in the right direction.
— Hans Wiik
We all respond to financial incentives. Currently, the incentive is to provide more care, but not necessarily the right or better care.
~ Hans Wiik
Providers
If we are going to move beyond the fee-for-service model and provide patients with better, safer, more affordable, and accountable care, providers must take a leading role.
One smart way to provide better care is to take advantage of physicians’ natural competitiveness. Our best and brightest didn’t get where they are by being ambivalent. Physicians are take-charge people who stake their reputation on the quality of care they provide their patients. Let’s harness that enthusiasm.
For example, electronic medical records (EMRs) can compile data in a transparent and trusted way. If implemented and used properly with good added analytics support, EMRs can lead to healthy competition between physicians with documented performance improvement in both prevention and clinical measures. How did Dr. X improve his pneumovax vaccination rate in patients over the age of 65 by 25% in one year?
This type of data transparency and benchmarking is vital to developing more consistent and valuable EMRs — records that provide trusted analytics for improving performance in quality and cost reduction. There are dozens of EMR products on the market; the trouble is that none of them do a good job of data providing good analytic reports and functions that assist our medical practice and providers in driving performance improvement. Currently, the industry relies too heavily on insurance claims data that is missing many key components for measuring clinical quality in driving performance improvement.
- What if we rewarded innovation in electronic medical records?
- What if we incentivized sharing best practices between medical practices and individual providers?
- What if we got out of our silos and had regular conversations between providers, insurers, employers, and patients?
- How many new efficiencies do you think we could come up with?
- What education should providers be promoting to insurers and employers (including employees) on the efficient and effective way to access and use the healthcare system. For example, after-hours care, ER and urgent care, imaging and lab tests, drug costs, and essential prevention measures.
At the Hans Wiik Health Group, we believe that the remedy for our ailing healthcare system lies in education, incentives, creative collaboration, and the intelligent use of data and technology.
Employers
Employers need to engage, consult, and work with local providers in order to address increasing healthcare costs and improve patient care — especially for the populations with chronic conditions (heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and so on).
Employers are in a prime position to redesign healthcare in America by promoting comprehensive primary care (especially for high risk patients), lowering inappropriate emergency room use, engaging providers to hold employee healthcare forums, and emphasizing prevention and wellness through relationships established with local primary care practices.
Through collaborative partnerships with insurers and local providers, employers can dramatically reduce the cost of healthcare in this country.
Value-based benefit design is also fundamental to this process.
Employers can and should design and support these new tools for promoting an employee culture of health and wellness.
Why wouldn’t we want the healthiest people in our communities teaching our children? Ask yourself: What’s the #1 reason for low teacher salaries? The answer is increasing healthcare costs. ~ Hans Wiik
Insurers
In the old model of healthcare, employers and insurers had three tools at their disposal to combat spiraling healthcare costs:
Lower or limit benefits
Charge more for the same benefits
In an accountable care environment, leading-edge insurers are creating collaborative relationships with providers, employers, and patients to lower costs and increase the quality of healthcare — especially for the most common chronic diseases. “Accountable care” means all & only the care that patients should receive — nothing more, nothing less.
In this new healthcare model, the emphasis is on team-based primary care, increased community social services including essential follow-ups within 48 hours of a hospital discharge — all of which can lower overall costs, reduce preventable re-hospitalizations, and keep emergency room visits to a minimum. The key is to provide new care coordination models for high-risk patients who have significant care transitions — from skilled nursing facilities to hospitals, hospitals to home, hospitals to hospice and/or palliative care.
For insurers who have yet to embrace these sorts of changes, the question is not whether to participate, but rather how, when, where, in which patient populations, and who makes the best partners.
Insurers are all too aware that the move to efficient, effective, accountable healthcare is not without risks. Besides profits and losses, the big challenges include designing and implementing new collaborative healthcare models — that are still affordable for employers and patients.
These concerns highlight the need for unprecedented levels of communication and cooperation with providers, employers, and other stake holders.
For the new model of accountable healthcare to succeed, we must develop and implement new collaborative relationships between insurers, employers, providers, and patients that actively improves the quality of healthcare while simultaneously lowering costs. ~ Hans Wiik
Bringing these four groups together to improve everyone’s position is what consulting services at the Hans Wiik Health Group is all about.