A better way: Smart health care. Better results.

Welcome to Priority at Work – Priority Health's employer newsletter designed to help you better manage your health benefits plan. Whether it's the latest updates on health care reform legislation or details about the latest financial or wellness tools available to you and your employees, we've got you covered. We want to help you save money while keeping your employees healthy.

In this month's issue, we're giving you information and tips about our excellent pharmacy program, our substantial provider network, enrollment reminders, health savings account (HSA) tools and more. These are all ways that Priority Health is improving the way health care is delivered by optimizing health, ensuring better experiences for your employees and eliminating avoidable medical costs. Our efforts around eliminating avoidable costs include several new initiatives that will help your employees get the best possible health outcomes while eliminating waste in the system by:

• Ensuring the most appropriate care. This means helping your employees understand all of their treatment options (through educational materials and online decision-support tools) and holding doctors accountable for making treatment recommendations based on best practices.
  
  In particular, we're using national benchmarks to identify several "preference-sensitive" procedures (such as c-sections and knee surgery) that may be over-prescribed. With these procedures, the patient makes the ultimate treatment decision.
• Wiping out fraud and abuse. Because it accounts for as much as 10% of the total medical spend in the U.S., fraud and abuse can drive up the overall cost of health care. We have a special team performing audits on certain medical and pharmacy claims, investigating concerns reported to Priority Health and raising awareness through various communications with your employees.

With Priority Health, you can trust that you get more value for your health care dollar because we focus on the health of your employees as well as your bottom line.

Thank you for doing business with Priority Health, and we hope you find the articles and tips in this Priority at Work newsletter helpful. You can expect to hear from us frequently and we’d like this to be a two-way communication – feel free to send us your suggestions and comments at EMAIL@priorityhealth.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

Don Whitford
Vice President, Sales & Client Services

Topics: Controlling costs