If you’re thinking about offering virtual care to your employees, you may be wondering how to choose the right program. While these programs have numerous proven benefits for both your employees and the workplace, not all programs are designed to meet your company’s needs. When it comes to determining the right fit for your organization and staff, it helps to know what to look out for. That’s why we outline a few steps below you could take when determining which virtual care program and partner could be the right fit for your organization.
Discover why employers should consider offering comprehensive virtual care that’s designed to help employees better manage their health.
Before any new program launches, it’s important to establish what success could look like for your organization. “What types of outcomes and key metrics do you want your virtual care plan to meet, and is there a timeline for those goals?” according to The One Brief.
Clearly stating what your organization hopes to achieve with this program will help determine which virtual care provider can best meet your needs. Additionally, ranking your goals and objectives can also help shape how extensive your virtual care strategy should be for your workplace.
For example, do your company’s goals include lowering healthcare costs, boosting employee productivity, or increasing employee engagement in company-led initiatives? If so, finding the right program that can help deliver success on those metrics could positively impact not just your employees, but your organization as a whole.
When deciding upon a virtual care program for your employees, it may be beneficial to consider choosing a program that’s customized to your specific needs. Along with the goals and objectives that are most important to your company, it’s also important to know your staff and plan around what they may need. Without this component, gaining participation within the program may turn out to be an uphill climb.
One approach to discovering how to choose a plan that employees will participate in is by gaining insight through data and analytics. Based on the data you already have available, analyze usage trends and costs for different types of care. It can also be helpful to check “employees’ health risks, disparities and conditions to see where there could be potential gaps in care access and support,” according to The One Brief. These tactics can help determine how your program can meet goals such as lowering healthcare costs and bettering employee health outcomes.
A virtual care partner that can collaborate with your healthcare broker to securely obtain and analyze employee health information can assist in this process. This way, together, you can curate a comprehensive program that’s centered on the data gained from your employee population’s health.
Starting a new program isn’t always easy, especially when introducing it to employees who may initially show a lack of interest in participating in it. One common reason behind this reaction could be the lack of ease in either initially enrolling or consistently engaging with it. Therefore, ensuring the experience is a seamless one that can easily integrate into employees’ busy days will be key.
For example, health programs that exclusively focused on traditional office visits tended to have less participation because of the disruption to employees’ workdays. If they must miss work to receive in-person medical attention, many will often skip the visit, especially if the travel and wait times tend to be long. While missing routine appointments and preventive health visits can have potentially negative consequences such as worsened health conditions and greater cost of care, requiring them to go in-person could also reduce productivity.
This why offering a virtual care program that easily connects employees to resources when they need it can prove to be beneficial.
A chronic disease management program is one example that offers consistent, confidential interactions to employees when they need it. This is because they decide how often they would like to be contacted. Once a schedule is established, an experienced care team can help them develop practical ways to manage and track their health. They also get a chance to have any questions or concerns addressed before they become significant.
Creating this type of experience where employees feel it’s personalized to their needs and helps them feel empowered in their healthcare decision-making can improve engagement and ultimately, boost outcomes.
In fact, companies often observe that once these types of initiatives are implemented, employees tend to be happier, healthier, and more productive. They feel their companies care about them, which can lead to greater employee satisfaction, improved company morale, and less absenteeism.
Once you determine what’s most important to your organization, finding a trusted partner that shares your vision is key. Whether your intended focus is on maximizing workplace productivity, keeping your employees healthy, or lowering healthcare costs, your partner should have a vested interest in meeting these goals.
Ensuring a virtual care provider is the right fit for your organization can also depend on how the program is implemented. If they are not aligned with you in what you value, it may be difficult to help make your virtual care strategy a reality. Therefore, “discuss your expectations of the program and the barriers you feel you may face. An experienced partner should know how to navigate these challenges and make launching these solutions easier for you,” according to Wellbox. Additionally, decide on how you would like to measure your strategy’s success together.
Finally, when assessing partnerships that could be the right fit for your company, these questions may also be helpful to consider, according to The One Brief:
If leveraging a customized, turnkey chronic disease management program sounds like something that could work well for your workplace, our team can help. Contact us today to get started.
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