In Memory of Those Whose Sacrafice has Given Us the Gift of Freedom

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Each and every day, Americans and millions of others throughout the world remember and honor all those whose sacrifice has secured for us the blessings of liberty. It is because of these individuals that we enjoy freedom of thought and self expression; the very foundation that makes StrategyDriven possible.

Today, we remember all those who made the ultimate sacrifice to secure for us, our children, and all future generations, the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The video below honors the memory of First Lieutenant Travis Manion, United States Marine Corps, and Lieutenant Brendan Looney, United States Navy, who were United States Naval Academy classmates, company mates, and roommates; becoming as close as brothers. One went to Iraq, the other to Afghanistan. Both were killed in action and have been laid to rest, side-by-side, in Arlington National Cemetery.

The value of freedom comes at a hefty price. Individuals endanger their lives to secure the freedom and safety of their country, a course much more significant than themselves. However, sometimes the families of the veterans may go unappreciated even though they sacrifice a lot to ensure the nation remains safe. As a result, it is crucial to have a support system that promotes the well-being of families of fallen heroes. When done correctly, the families will feel appreciated, and the support can help them secure their children’s future by sending them to schools and even starting businesses.

Although this can be a one-time event, it is prudent to have programs running to remember the services delivered by fallen veterans. In addition, during remembrance, one can have Urns to present to families of the great fallen heroes. And since this cannot be achieved without resources, joining hands to raise funds for such a noble cause is priceless. While you’ll be giving the little you have, it will give you a fulfilling feeling of touching the lives of deserving persons. Strive to join StrategyDriven in helping to transform the lives of thousands across the country.

Using Healthcare Performance Management as a Business Strategy

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Explore how Healthcare Performance Management (HPM), combined with self-insurance, can empower organizations not only to better manage their governance, risk and compliance exposures, but also to deliver bottom-line business value to a company.

By applying the right people, processes and technology to those three focus areas, HPM can empower companies to execute a powerful business strategy that can reduce healthcare costs while also improving employees’ health outcomes.

The first step rests with how companies choose to deliver health benefits to their employees. While every organization’s healthcare plans differ, for example UCLA benefits offers custom packages for each employee, there are two ways coverage can be provided: through fully insured plans, in which they purchase coverage from an insurance company, or through self-insured plans, in which they directly cover employees’ healthcare expenses.

Self-insurance recently has become the option of choice for a majority of the workforce. In 2008, the nonprofit Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) found that 55 percent of workers with health insurance were covered by a self-insured plan. The decision to self-insure has been embraced enthusiastically by large corporations – 89 percent of workers employed in firms with 5,000 or more employees were in self-insured plans in 2008.

By self-insuring, employers can control the costs of providing health benefits to their employees because it allows them to:

  • Obtain more specific information about their actual healthcare expenditures.
  • Control costs, because instead of paying health insurance premiums that typically rise 9 to 10 percent per year, they can pay for routine expenses such as doctor visits, procedures and prescription drugs through a self-insured plan, obtaining lower-cost catastrophic or “stop-loss” policies to cover major medical events.
  • Enable better “human capital management” by recognizing in advance what types of health events are emerging in their covered population in time to help employees avoid a catastrophic event.

An HPM strategy has profound implications for senior management in the three critical areas of governance, risk and compliance. This manifests itself in the following ways:

  • Governance requires the active engagement of business units beyond human resources – strategic planners, financial and operations executives, and the IT group.
  • Self-insured firms must manage their own risk, so access to real-time data that is tied to the plan is imperative.
  • Although corporations have dedicated resources to compliance activities, an HPM system is automated and therefore can deliver those required reports as an ancillary function. This way, organizations can generate the necessary documentation for auditors, regulators and others without devoting valuable resources to that single function.

Governance, Risk, and Compliance Management Strategies for Self-Insured Health Plans: How Senior Executives Can Use Healthcare Performance Management as a Business Strategy explores how HPM, combined with self-insurance, empowers organizations to better manage their governance, risk and compliance exposures, and delivers bottom-line value to the company.

Click here to download a complimentary copy of this Healthcare Performance Management Institute report.

Want to learn more?

Listen to our recent StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective podcast interview with George Pantos, Executive Director of the Healthcare Performance Management Institute during which we discuss how companies can keep their current health plans in light of the recently passed healthcare legislation and under what circumstances they may wish to do so.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:57 — 27.4MB)

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StrategyDriven Available on LeadershipDigital

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StrategyDriven is honored to have our non-subscriber content included on LeadershipDigital, a topic hub that collects and organizes the best business and leadership articles on the web in order to advantage its audience of executives and managers. Topic Hubs are sites that aggregate content from a variety of sources, organize that content around keywords in the topic domain, and support both manual and social curation of the content.

LeadershipDigital‘s goals are:

Collect High Quality Content – The goal of a content community is to provide a high quality destination that highlights the most recent and best content as defined by the community.

Provide an Easy to Navigate Site – End users most often are people who are not regular readers of the blogs and other sources. They come to the content community to find information on particular topics of interest to them. This links them across to the sources themselves.

Be A Jump Off Point – To be clear all content communities are only jump off points to the sources of the content.

Help Surface Content that Might Not be Found – It’s often hard to find and understand blog content that’s spread across sites. Most users are not regular subscribers to these blogs and other content sources.

The site is a collaborative effort started by Tony Karrer. It is generously sponsored by Enlightened Leadership Solutions.

StrategyDriven Welcomes Rachelle Zimmerman

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The StrategyDriven family is proud to introduce Rachelle Zimmerman as our Website Editor! As StrategyDriven‘s Website Editor, she oversees all online content development and publishing.

Rachelle is a connoisseur of various online marketing methodologies. She has consulted with numerous firms and contributed to the development and implementation of their marketing strategies, specifically for search engine optimization and social media marketing, in order to expand their web presence and visibility. Her strategies integrate every aspect of SEO and social media marketing from start to finish.

Rachelle particularly enjoys keyword research for SEO campaigns, since it appeals to her more analytical thought process. Ironically, she also enjoys writing and blogging, both for SEO blogs and in general, for the creative outlet that it provides her. Rachelle’s love of language has served her well both in terms of writing as well as proofreading and editing.

Originally from New Jersey, Rachelle currently attends Bar Ilan University in Jerusalem, Israel.

Rachelle can be contacted at: [email protected]

Companies Need to Manage Employee Health – Not Just Benefits

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With U.S. healthcare spending set to grow 5 percent – or more than $100 billion – each year through 2013, businesses are scrambling for ways to save money on their health benefits. To do so, they’ll have to invest proactively in their employees’ health – and not just shop around for a good insurance deal, according to a new report from the Healthcare Performance Management (HPM) Institute.

Active management of healthcare delivery and cost control has not typically been seen as an integral part of the mission for human resource (HR) departments. But changing times – and skyrocketing costs – have pushed healthcare performance management (HPM) center stage for companies that want to boost productivity, while investing benefits dollars in better health outcomes for their employees.

This shift away from traditional ways of managing employee health benefits stems from a clear and universal reality: rising healthcare costs increasingly pose a core business challenge. Indeed, U.S. healthcare spending approached $2.25 trillion in 2007 – more than 16 percent of the gross domestic product according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Employers increasingly are feeling the bite of those rising costs. A 2008 study conducted by the health policy journal Health Affairs showed that average annual premiums increased 5 percent to $4,704 for single coverage and $12,680 for family coverage. The study’s data was derived from interviews with 1,927 public and private employers.

New research echoes those trends. According to a Dec. 2010 report from RNCOS Industry Research Solutions “U.S. Healthcare Sector Forecast to 2012”, national healthcare spending is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of around 5 percent during 2010-2013.

The Last Mile: The Role of HPM in Rounding Out the Enterprise Human Resource Management Mission calls on companies to incorporate workforce health into their overall strategy for protecting and developing their human capital resources. This report also explains how HR teams are deploying healthcare performance management (HPM) technology to improve employee health and productivity.

Click here to download a complimentary copy of this Healthcare Performance Management Institute report.

Want to learn more?

Listen to our recent StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective podcast interview with George Pantos, Executive Director of the Healthcare Performance Management Institute during which we discuss how companies can keep their current health plans in light of the recently passed healthcare legislation and under what circumstances they may wish to do so.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:57 — 27.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS