Unlocking Better Health: The Power of Advanced Primary Care for Employers

In our How Health Happens webinar, Jonathan Leizman, MD, spoke with Asaf Bitton, MD, MPH, with Ariadne Labs and Ann Greiner, MCP, with Primary Care Collaborative to discuss how high-quality, advanced primary care can unlock better health for employee populations. Watch “Unlocking Better Health: The Power of Advanced Primary Care for Employers” on-demand to learn more about the benefits of making high-quality advanced primary care easier to use:

Better Health with Advanced Primary Care

The webinar explored healthcare challenges facing organizations as well as the benefits and aspects of high-quality primary care — also called advanced primary care.

A few of the key takeaways included:

The current primary care landscape pushes people to more expensive healthcare options.

There is a growing lack of a “usual place of care”, as Greiner put it, for many people as care becomes less accessible. This is leading to emergency room or urgent care visits taking the place of primary care for non-urgent healthcare needs. The problem is that they meet these needs at much higher costs and without the key relational aspects found in advanced primary care. Having a go-to place for primary care needs helps with avoiding or reducing costs and illnesses as well as improving overall health. There is significant value in having a go-to primary care provider (PCP).

High-quality primary care is relational and community based.

As Greiner and Dr. Bitton agreed, high-quality primary care is relational and should be rooted in the communities they serve. By educating and training care teams in their communities, they become experts in the challenges their communities face including social drivers of health — which can have significant impact on health and healthcare access. This also gives community members that “usual place of care” that Greiner mentioned. Strong relationships between individuals and their PCPs allow social drivers and other community factors to be effectively rolled into high-quality primary care services, enabling whole-person care.

Employers are poised to play an important role through primary care investments.

Dr. Bitton and Greiner believe that employers can play a role in solving primary care issues. By making investments into primary care for their workforce, they can help tip the balance back towards primary care and begin tapping into the benefits it brings such as better health, happier people, and lower costs.

Advanced Primary Care at Premise Health

We know investments into primary care pay off. Our advanced primary care model starts with primary care and includes behavioral health, pharmacy, and more to drive the best results for our members and clients. To show our results, we conducted a claims-based analysis using a Milliman-validated methodology on approximately 148,000 eligible lives. Across this population, which spanned 19 clients, we delivered:

• 25% average total cost of care savings
• 39% increase in routine and preventive office visits routine
• 37% reduction in inpatient hospital admissions
• 27% reduction in emergency room visits

Advanced primary care works and is the first step in unlocking better health for your people. If you’re interested in what advanced primary care looks like for your organization, contact us today.