Advocacy Program

The Integrated Health Advocacy Program (IHAP) is designed to significantly reduce your organization's healthcare expense, while actually improving the health of the highest cost segment of employees. An integrated approach to whole person healthcare, IHAP focuses on the 20% of benefit plan participants whose utilization accounts for the majority of the expense.

Why do you need an alternative to your current healthcare strategy?

Healthcare costs are continuing to rise. National average cost increases for the last three years for health plans have been in excess of 11%. There are no indications that employers should expect any relief from this trend in the foreseeable future. At this rate, healthcare expenses will double in less than seven years, further eroding a significant percentage of organizational profits.

Those familiar with health plan experience agree:

• Health care is the largest component of employee benefit cost.
• 25% or more of employees receive little, if any, healthcare dollars.
• 80% of the healthcare dollars go to 20% of the people.
• 50% of these same dollars go to only 5% of people.
• Half of those in the 5% group will incur large claims in multiple years.
• In health plans, the primary variable in annual expenditures from year-to-year is due to those 5%-20% of cases that account for the majority of all costs.

Common cost management strategies

The most common strategies currently proposed for reducing healthcare costs have minimum potential for long-term for effectiveness.

These are:

• Transfer to a lower cost insurer. (Is this possible without serious quality-of-care or financial issues)?
• Find a partner with better negotiated rates for the benefit services. (Are clinical providers able to decrease rates even further and still stay in business?)
• Raise employee premiums, co-pays, deductibles or out-of-pocket maximums. (Does a cost transfer cause negative employee relations?)
• Reduce the number of participants by either raising eligibility thresholds for participants, raising premiums to a level some cannot afford and/or lowering benefit maximums so coverage terminates. (Do these have a negative employee relations impact?)

Why IHAP works

• IHAP impacts the issue of rising health costs in an organization by using an integrated health advocacy team to manage the care of the 5%-20% of the people who account for the majority of the costs.
• IHAP acknowledges that human healing does not happen on an annual fiscal cycle and uses a strategy that manages benefit payments over an employment career.
• IHAP partners with the participants in the program, guiding them in make healthier lifestyle choices -- the only real way to impact their health status.

The Integrated Health Advocacy Program has proven that maximizing the health of the "sickest of the sick" in an organization has a significant and positive impact on mitigating rising healthcare costs and future liabilities.

For more information

For more information, call (574) 262-4914.