Harnessing Healthcare Costs: Tactics for Today
Working together, employers have the ability address fundamental issues in healthcare: pricing, quality, overuse, incentives and care delivery. This one day conference aimed at CEOs, CFOs, HR and company owners is packed with information about what employer across the county are doing to tame rapidly rising medical and pharmaceutical costs.
AGENDA
8:30 Registration
9:00 – Opening remarks
9:20 Cheryl Larson – Navigating the Pharmacy Frontier
Today’s health benefits professional needs to make critical and informed decisions to better manage the higher cost of pharmaceuticals, particularly specialty drugs. Understanding key trends is important to support employer efforts in effectively managing this challenging benefit. This session will provide compelling research, information and tools to support employers efforts in:
- Understanding the landscape, key stakeholders, what’s driving specialty drug costs, which stakeholders are providing value and which are not
- Gaining insight into the costly business practice of PBMs as pharmacy benefits middlemen – how they function, what deals they cut, how they generate revenue, what services they perform and how their lack of pricing, rebates and contract transparency is adding to employer costs
- Identifying employer strategies to tackle these challenges and learning about employer models that support plan performance and cost management efforts
Noon: Lunch and networking
1:00 - Wyoming Department of Workforce Services – Workers Compensation
Spinal surgery reduction program
Several news stories have talked about the high rate of back surgeries in Wyoming. Now there is a protocol for employers to help lower those rates. Wyoming’s Workers Compensation program has seen success, but employers need to push our TPAs to get on board. Avoiding a single surgery can save you over $70,000 in direct medical costs alone, not to mention lost work time and other indirect costs.
- Learn about this proven protocol that dramatically reduces the number of back surgeries
- Identify ways to promote this program through workers compensation as well as your health benefits plan
2:00 – Community Conversation : How can we work with our TPAs to implement similar programs for non-workers comp cases???
2:30 Break
2:45 Using data to manage your plan – Don Creveling /Bob Burnaugh
Mining your claims data is key to identifying opportunities to better manage your healthcare spend. However, many plan sponsors have no idea what to look for or what kinds of questions to ask their health plan or data analytics vendor. This session will provide you with case studies, real life examples of how employers have dug into their data and the action steps they took as a result.
3:45 – Wrap up
4:00 - Adjourn