“If employers' health promotion efforts are successful, workers use health care services sparingly, they have lower absenteeism, disability rates decrease, worker safety improves, and productivity is improved. When done right, this presents a "win-win" for employees and employers.”

— Ron Z. Goetzel, Health Affairs, Jan/Feb 2009

Claremont Partners Introduces Accountable Care Integrator To Benefit Consultants and Health Care Leaders

January 14, 2009

Health benefit consultants and Taft-Hartley plan trustees continue to respond enthusiastically to Claremont Partners’ strategic benefit integration solution, Accountable Care Integrator (ACI), according to principals Tom Bjornson and Phil Polakoff, MD.

“In the past several weeks we’ve met with a dozen or more executives to discuss their growing concerns about out of control health benefit costs and the critical need to raise the bar on performance of labor/management health benefit programs,” according to Bjornson. “Uniformly, they believe a service like ACI is needed to leverage health benefit dollars and dramatically improve early identification and treatment of health and wellness issues that drain productivity.”

Findings from a recent Hewitt Associates study indicate that employers want to increase employee accountability, reduce health risks, measure employee risk levels, use health care and health data measurement tools, and integrate and optimize benefits and programs¹.

“These are exactly the issues we are addressing through ACI,” said Polakoff, who will be meeting with labor health and welfare trust leaders the week of Jan. 19 in Las Vegas during the annual meeting of the California Public Employers/Employees Health Care Coalition. “We’re finding tremendous receptivity to the simple principles on which ACI is based.”

According to Bjornson, it is in the self-interest of health benefit providers and vendors to cooperate and implement tools like ACI’s Solution Center since better integration improves each vendor’s results while demonstrating greater value to the employer.

“Vendors might be initially concerned that their role or control over services will be compromised when we begin to discuss an integrated system among vendors,” said Bjornson. “But those fears dissipate as we talk about our shared interests and commitment to better health and productivity. The goal of ACI is not to diminish the role of any particular vendor, but to strengthen all of them.”

Information about Claremont Partners and Accountable Care Integrator is available at www. claremontpartners.net.

¹”the Road Ahead: Driving Productivity by Investing in Health 2008,”Hewitt Associates.