The doctor is in. Your office.
Having a doctor on-site at a business is a major innovation in solving the health care cost crisis for Vermont businesses. I'll describe the benefits in two ways: 1. Hard benefits, or those that would take a few moments to calculate monetarily and 2. Soft benefits, monetary and otherwise, that accrue to you over time.
Hard benefits
As a business in Vermont, you don't have a lot of levers to pull when it comes to managing insurance costs. Either you have a few insurers from which to choose, or, if you are large, you can self-insure. Whatever path you've taken, your costs have been going up.
I can offer your business relief by helping to stabilize your insurance costs. By having me on-site, and potentially using Health Saving Accounts, you can switch to a higher deductible, if not the highest deductible, insurance plan available. This saves you a large amount of money while offering better, more convenient care to your employees.
In addition, by working with your employees on wellness as well as sickness, I can help you lower your insurance risk ratings over time. This is tremendously valuable monetarily. Harvard Business Review published a study that showed that wellness programs alone return $6 for every $1 invested.
Depending on where you are today, and the characteristics of your organization, your return on investment in me can reach 500% per year, just in hard benefits, on large dollar amounts. Not a bad start.
Soft benefits
But it gets better. A lot better. The soft benefits of my on-site concierge medical service are wonderful. What West-coast technology firms such as Google realized is that it made no sense for their employees to drive around Silicon Valley and wait in doctors' offices. So they innovated and brought the doctors into the Google office buildings.
This saves employees a great deal of time and energy. Instead of taking the afternoon off to visit the doctor, employees walk down the hall and are back in 20 minutes, without traffic stress. Medical problems are caught early while they are small, and wellness programs can engage a medical doctor. Google, and hopefully you in the future, benefit from time efficiency and ease of access.
But there is a larger benefit here. Providing a concierge doctor on-site is not something most businesses offer today in Vermont. In fact, at most only a handful do in the Lake Champlain region. It makes your employees feel special, feel cared for by you as well as me, and it engenders intense loyalty. (It may also help you attract excellent employees.) In today's world, where many parents both work and raise families, on-site care shows a sensitivity to the demands on their time.
The Upshot
Concierge Medicine News summarized it best:
Here's the upshot: When you combine high-deductible health plan policies with a concierge medical program, you empower people and families to make better decisions about their health care, they in turn receive more comprehensive medical care and then the savings happen and stronger relationships occur between the physician and their patients. One California concierge physician recently made the statement that truly encompasses this fact when she says her patients can say 'I no longer have a doctor who needs to look at my chart to know my name.'
Business, labor unions, and governments are realizing how amazing the savings and care is in this model. Invest your money where it matters, and multiplies: on-site care.
