How to buy the Healthcare Providers you need (3/3)

This month I’ve been looking into the murky world of health providers. To summarise, in the UK we have developed, by accident and complacency, a commoditised market of poor health providers, which are being bought by people who have no idea how to challenge them. 

The end result is that businesses are spending a lot of money on things that they don’t need – and employees aren’t receiving the right health care. So how can you stop this happening? 

First, start with the ‘What’:  

What are you trying to achieve? What I see often is that an organisations existing providers aren’t linked or even part of the organisational health, mental health and wellbeing strategy. The Wellbeing strategy covers MHFA and mindfulness but doesn’t link in to the Occupational Health or PHI… 

So, write an end-to-end health, mental health and wellbeing strategy which covers everything from health promotion and prevention, all the way through to how to look after people who are off sick. I have covered how to do this is a previous month. If you’d like any further advise you feel free to private message me.   

Then, decide the ‘How’

Once you have decided what your strategy is and what you are trying to achieve from it, you THEN decide what providers you need. This can be a blend of existing providers, new ones or using existing ones differently. There is no rush to get rid of existing providers. This is about shaping things for the future and getting yourself ready for when you re-procure. 

1.    Data: Collate the data from your existing providers and use this to help inform your strategy. What services are your people using? What illnesses do they have? What do you need more of?

2.    Audit: Perform a comprehensive audit of all of the providers that you actually already have (if any). What can you keep? What can you alter and where are the gaps that need filling?

a.     What clinical evidence base does the services they provide have?

b.    How effective are they? 

c.     Does their services have an impact on your employees health, mental health or wellbeing? Absence?

3.    Principles: Create a set of principles for your organisation. A long term desired state of the health and wellbeing provision you want to get to over time. E.g. we would like to offer all employees and their families comprehensive private health insurance which covers mental health care. Or, we would like to ensure all our employees have access to occupational health. These principles form your intention.

4.     Strategy: Create a strategy for, over time, moving your providers (or new providers) to the desired state. 

a.     Be clear what you need and why. Where do they fit into the strategy? What is their purpose?

b.    Make sure you have the appropriate expertise you need to procure them. I spend a lot of time helping organisations do this. Just using a Reward / HR person, procurement and a broker won’t often give you the result you want.

c.     Don’t be afraid of shopping around or using an RFI process to gain information about the market so you can design your own bespoke solution in an RFP.   

d.    Don’t be afraid of challenging a provider to set themselves up to work for you and your organisation. If they want your business they will…

The utopia I would like to see is all large organisations commissioning their own end-to-end health, mental health and wellbeing to really take care of their employees. I’m not going to hold my breath for this to happen anytime soon though. What are your thoughts on the future? Where do you think we need to be? 

Next, I will be looking at ‘Who should lead Wellbeing?” This is often a very political issue and I have seen many organisations deal with it differently. As a teaser, I’ll be talking about why HR might not be the best place to lead it from…