Employers that have not implemented policies or practices for employees who are also caregivers may be open to doing so. AARP and Northeast Business Group on Health have developed a tool kit to help employers support their working caregivers. Share it with your employer to help them learn more.
The nonprofit Northeast Business Group on Health (NEBGH), a coalition of employers that sponsor health benefits, has posted an online resource, Digital Tools and Solutions for Diabetes: An Employer's Guide, for employers interested in digital tools that can help employees prevent and manage diabetes.
"Employers are well-aware of the costs associated with diabetes in their employee and dependent populations," said Candice Sherman, CEO of NEBGH. Employers also are "increasingly aware of the links between diabetes and other chronic and debilitating health conditions, including cardiovascular disease."
The Connecticut Business Group on Health (CTBGH) is an advocacy group working to leverage the purchasing power of employers to make an impact on the quality and cost of delivery of healthcare in Connecticut. CTBGH works with organizations including the Connecticut Choosing Wisely® Collaborative, the Moving to Value Alliance, The Leapfrog Group and the Northeast Business Group on Health.
Employee productivity has long been something of an obsessive focus for corporations. According to a 2015 study, “Relatively common conditions such as hypertension, heart disease, and depression are estimated to cost $392, $368, and $348, respectively, per employee per year owing to productivity loss.”
"There has been a big jump in the percentage of companies offering concierge services that help employees navigate where to go for care and make the best decisions," Marcotte of the NBGH said. "We are also seeing primary care models move away from the traditional fee-for-service or encounter-based reimbursement model to more comprehensive patient-centered population health management."
Many employers are also making more use of telemedicine and other forms of remote medical care. "Virtual products bring health care to the consumer rather than the consumer going to health care -- and you are seeing significant growth in this area," Marcotte said.
Hope for lowering the cost of coverage lies in these kinds of approaches, said Candice Sherman, CEO of the Northeast Business Group on Health.
"It's a shared burden that unfortunately causes financial stress for employees and their families," she said. "Many of these initiatives hold promise for improving health outcomes and overall wellness as well as lowering costs."
Candice Sherman joined the Northeast Business Group on Health in 2013 as chief operating officer, applying her skills in hunting for efficiencies while enhancing operations and revenue opportunities for the employer-led coalition of health care leaders. She was promoted to chief executive last year after impressing the board of directors with her ideas about high-value projects that could transform how health care is delivered, measured and financed in the employer marketplace. NEBGH now plays a key role in policy forums and work groups on health care quality and transparency. Sherman also is chair of HealthPass New York, an NEBGH subsidiary that is a nonprofit health insurance exchange for small businesses.
For employers, caregiving benefits are becoming a new way to attract and retain talent in a tight job market. A survey by the Northeast Business Group on Health and AARP ranked caregiving among the top 10 employee health and wellness benefits priorities for most employers.
Three recent caregiving reports (Harvard Business School’s The Caring Company, Torchlight’s “Modern Caregiving Challenges Facing U.S. Employees, and Northeast Business Group on Health’s recent caregiving survey) had similar (and important) findings regarding caregiving issues that impact thousands of employers and millions of their employees. Today’s employee caregivers are exhausted, overwhelmed and stressed as they try to juggle family responsibilities with the demands of their jobs. Without proper support from their employers, the ability to succeed at both seems out of reach.
According to AARP Public Policy Institute, about 100 major U.S. firms have adopted or expanded paid family leave over the past three years, but only 20 percent made the it available to family caregivers.
That is likely to change, according to Candice Sherman, CEO of the Northeast Business Group on Health.
More than half of millennial caregivers are the sole provider for an elderly family member, providing an average of 26 hours of care each week.
“People are living longer, there are gaps in the health care system, employees are more dispersed geographically, so they are caregiving from afar. Large employers are aware,” she said.
The vast majority of employers surveyed by the Northeast Business Group on Health in 2017 agree that caregiving will become an increasingly important issue over the next five years, and nearly half cite caregiving as one of their top 10 priorities.
Yelp (YELP) recently announced a partnership that will expand its hospital maternity care rating service. In collaboration with the Northeast Business Group on Health, Yelp will begin to rate the quality of maternity care at some 50 hospitals in New York. This move will expand Yelp’s maternity care rating service, which it has been operating in California in partnership with the California Health Care Foundation.
Yelp believes that rating hospital maternity care will help expecting parents to make an informed decision about where they want their baby delivered. The company also hopes the rating will encourage hospitals to improve the quality of their maternity care.
At the end of the day, Yelp hopes that expanding its maternity care rating service will make its review site more valuable to users. Yelp mostly makes money from its review platform by providing advertising services. The company’s advertising revenue increased 6.0% YoY to $227 million in the first quarter. Advertising revenue rose 26% YoY at Facebook (FB), 18% YoY at Twitter (TWTR), and 15.4% YoY at Google (GOOGL) in the first quarter.
Yelp is expanding its hospital maternity care rating service at a time when it is expected to face increased competition for women’s attention and advertising dollars after Pinterest (PINS) went public. Pinterest, which says two-thirds of its audience is female, used its IPO last month to raise $1.4 billion in additional cash that it could spend toward to compete against rivals such as Yelp.