Would you give every employee an unlimited budget to spend however they like?
No. of course not. But isn't that exactly what you do with healthcare? Give them a basically unlimited budget with no training?
No matter how good and engaging your benefits are, and how well employees understand them (unlikely, but we've got your back there too), employees still need to be trained on how to use healthcare itself. That is the missing link. And this posting offers six good reasons that helping employees use healthcare wisely will pay off for your employees and for you.
No matter how good and engaging your benefits are, and how well employees understand them and use them (unlikely, but we've got your back there too), employees still need to be trained on how to use healthcare itself. That is the missing link. And there are six good reasons that helping employees use healthcare wisely will pay off for your employees and for you.
#1: You give employees an unlimited budget for healthcare.
To generalize from the equipment example, is there any other line item in your P&L where you give employees an unlimited budget, but with no training in how to spend it? Further, when they do spend it, you have no insight into how they are spending it, except at an aggregate level. If you thought they would spend it wisely on their own due to "healthcare consumerism" where you give them a high deductible, the next two reasons explain why that is unlikely.
#2: The healthcare “system” tries to get employees to spend more.
A tremendous amount of money has gone into creating the highest-tech, highest-cost healthcare assets the world has ever seen. Any fixed asset costs money when unused, so utilization is key to profitability. It was famously observed as early as 1961 by economist Kenneth Arrow that in healthcare, having insurance creates demand.
Providers know this. They have profit targets they must hit, and they aren’t going to hit them unless people use their systems.
#3: For exactly that reason, much of what employees spend their/your money on is useless and potentially harmful.
Largely as a result of Reasons #1 and #2 – having an unlimited budget to spend on an insatiable system – Americans use too much health care. You may already have a “consumerism” solution, which helps an employee find the best price for common tests and procedures. Quizzify can direct an employee to that solution, but our specialty is addressing the more basic question: “Should I get this test/procedure/drug in the first place?”
After playing Quizzify and getting a more balanced view of healthcare than providers and direct advertising might give them, employees may decide for themselves that the answer in many cases is: “No.”
This is not an original observation on our part. The best study done on the subject reveals 40% waste. Many books and articles have been written on this subject...
As these and other titles show, Americans are the most overscreened, overdiagnosed, overtreated, and overmedicated society on earth. Uniquely, Quizzify addresses this avalanche of unnecessary high-cost medical care head-on, through trivia quizzes teaching that "just because it's healthcare doesn't mean it's good for you,” and encouraging more interaction at a primary care level instead.
#4: The 90% of your employees without clinically significant chronic disease also incur medical expenses. Quizzify reaches them too.
You don't need a chronic disease to spend money. Indeed the top admissions, tests and procedures are far more frequent for non-chronically ill employees.
Do you know what your #1 most common reason for hospital admission is? About 25% of all your admissions? It’s birth events. They are probably also your most costly, in total – largely due to neonatal care expense. 70% of that expense – along with the employee stress that goes with it – turns out to be avoidable. This is according to a prospective controlled study of more than 1000 moms-to-be. 70%! That’s huge. But it only happens if you teach employees about the new blood test to predict prematurity, and then cover the high-risk maternity program for women who test positive, and also give them the time off needed for extra doctor visits.
Do you know what your #1 most common test is, by dollars? Over 200 per 1000 covered people on average? It’s CT scans. As the research concludes ("Americans are addicted to unnecessary scans"), and the graph below shows, Americans are voracious consumers of them. Quizzify teaches employees about the hazards, including the large dose of radiation. As a result, many employees will naturally demand fewer. Americans doctors already prescribe more than enough inappropriate scans. We don’t need patients demanding more. Our rate is twice as high as the average developed country...and 20% more than the next-highest!
Do you know what your #1 procedure is? About 400 of these per 1000 covered people? You’ll never guess…. It’s filling cavities. As those of you who have been following Quizzify recall, most cavities no longer need to be filled. But they will be, unless employees are taught to request the state-of-the-art treatment, silver diamine fluoride (SDF), which is simply applied to the cavity using a microbrush.
Once employees know it exists, it shouldn’t take much convincing because it costs about a fifth of what filling a cavity costs, not to mention being utterly painless and requiring only about five minutes.
As the testimonials show, though, employees need to know to ask. (“One of our daughter’s baby molars had the very beginnings of a cavity. The dentist wanted to drill and fill. As soon as I raised SDF the dentist responded by saying: ‘Sure. We can do that.’ Time for a new dentist.”)
We also provide a mobile app, to bring to the dentist or doctor’s office, to remind employees/patients what questions to ask, when they need to ask them.
Premature births, unnecessary scans, and obsolete expensive dental care are just three examples of what Quizzify might teach employees to reconsider. Other examples include stents, spinal fusions, arthroscopies, and medications for heartburn, pain or sleep.
#5. The other thing non-chronic employees incur is ER expense.
Probably the most useless expense of all is paying “discounted charges” for emergency visits and emergency admissions, not to mention undiscounted charges for out-of-network emergencies. In total, you’d be looking at close to 200 of these encounters per 1000. Four-figure megabills for ER visits and six-figure megabills for hospital emergencies are close to 100% avoidable, simply by using the Quizzify “Prevent Consent.” This has been proven to work many times…and six of the users have gone public. (“My bill far exceeded $10,000. Thanks to the consent, I paid $678.”)
Why not pay 2x Medicare instead of discounted charges which are usually 4-10x Medicare? That’s the multiple our Prevent Consent sets. Employees who use this language instead of just signing whatever the hospital puts in front of them will reduce your and their expense by up to 95%. (Not a misprint.)
Our language works 100% of the time. For instance, an ER visit coded to 99285 – “High complexity…high severity…posing a significant threat to life” was billed at $478. (Not a misprint.)
Once again, employees need to know to ask. And the only way they will know to do that is by taking the Quizzify quizzes and downloading our mobile app containing the language and the instructions on how to use it.
#6: Quizzify also helps chronically ill employees -- by educating them, starting where wellness programs end.
For instance, your wellness and diabetes programs quite correctly advise your employees to “avoid added sugar.”
Quizzify complements that advice by showing where the added sugars are hidden. Your diabetes rate can only decline if employees can actually act on the advice they get to avoid added sugar. Sugars are hidden everywhere. We show employees where to find them. Starting with avoiding “healthy” cereals like this one, consistently named the worst healthy-sounding cereal.
Among many other things, they shout "STRONG HEART" when in fact one single serving contains about half the added sugar we should be consuming in a full day...and it's still only about 7:00 AM.
This education is especially important for employees on GLP-1s. Once they get off, they'll likely go back to their old shopping and eating patterns...unless we teach them otherwise, which we specifically do for people on these drugs.
Chronic or non-chronic, employees engage with Quizzify more than with any other vendor. Recalling the opening paragraph about how many employees don’t engage at all, one reason for this is employees not wanting to share personal health information. Quizzify is unique in the universe of behavior-change vendors in that no personal health information (PHI) is required or even requested.
Add that attribute to Quizzify being educational and fun, and you can see why we are able to 100% guarantee, with no asterisks, that you only pay for people who complete the quizzes...and say they learned something from them.
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