Beyond Incentives: Seven Strategies to Drive Utilization of Your Medical Travel Benefit Plan
Medical Travel Benefits
You may have noticed that many U.S. employers are investigating whether they can reduce health care expenses by using medical travel. But how does this work? Can your business reduce healthcare costs by using foreign providers? The answer is complicated.
Medical travel is the practice of patients receiving care for certain procedures in foreign countries. Medical travel professionals have built networks of distinguished providers in India, Costa Rica, Singapore and Thailand who are accredited and serving American patients. These providers offer the same procedures by similarly qualified surgeons at state of the art hospitals for 30% to 50% off of negotiated prices in the U.S.
Employers and medical travel professionals are putting their heads together to design health plans that allow employees to travel for care and save. The employers who are embracing medical travel generally either go at it alone or collaborate with a medical travel company to design a benefit add on. Medical travel companies and other industry experts have a lot of experience and expertise to contribute to this process and should be consulted while building a medical travel benefit.
Here's why. Medical travel experts generally focus on financial incentives to drive utilization of foreign providers. However, your business will see better results if you invest early in the process to understand the employee population. By analyzing your employee demographics and understanding health consumer behavior, you can design a plan that connects with your target beneficiary group and changes their behavior.
The Anatomy of a Medical Travel Benefit Package
Health care consumers, both individuals and groups, are demanding competitive prices, more transparency and better quality care. Beneficiaries and patients have become health care consumers. The movement is called consumer-driven health care. Employers that offer health benefits are responding to this phenomenon with packages that let beneficiaries to take greater responsibility for their care and consumption decisions.
Global health benefits (as it is referred to by some in the industry) generally follow the health care consumerism model of high deductibles, behavior-inducing co-payments, and a health savings account. Global health benefits go one step further and offer financial incentives for patients who travel abroad for certain procedures.
The Role Of Incentives
Generally global health benefit plans use three types of incentives: financial incentives for patients to use preferred providers, non-use dependent incentives to attract beneficiaries. Like other low-cost health plans, global health benefits give patients more responsibility for health-related decisions. Enrollees choose from a network that includes preferred out-of-country providers. Financial incentives encourage patients to choose foreign providers for specific procedures.
Financial incentives reward patients who have certain procedures performed abroad. Employers may have a lower co-pay for foreign providers, pay enrollees cash for choosing foreign providers and/or cover the cost of travel to and from the location of the procedure. Employers may also let employees use non-vacation or personal time for in-country recovery.
Non-use dependent incentives attract new beneficiaries with low cost premiums and reward patients for taking advantage of preventative services like annual health check-ups, mammograms, prostate screenings and immunizations. While non-use dependent incentives won't directly drive utilization of foreign providers, they support the structure of plans that encourage patients to take control of their health consumption.
There are limits to the ability of financial incentives to increase utilization of preferred foreign providers. Incentives do not address what drives health care consumption. Without understanding the decision drivers at work, global benefit plans may not reduce health care cost significantly. A benefit plan must narrowly tailored to the target beneficiary demographic to change their behavior.
Beyond Incentives: Seven Strategies to Designing Medical Travel Benefits That Work
Below are seven strategies to help employers design a medical travel benefit that will achieve better results than incentives alone.
1. Assemble A Team Of Medical Travel Experts
As with all projects, it is critical to assemble the right team. Designing a medical travel benefit is no different. Identify medical travel experts and third party benefit administrators who want to collaborate with you. Having an experienced and knowledgeable team of experts is imperative.
2. Analyze Beneficiary Demographics
The foundation of a successful global health benefit is a complete understanding of the covered population, the group's demographics and behaviors, and what drives their health care decision-making. Approach the benefit design process from the ground up.
Start by identifying and analyzing the demographics and health care consumption patterns of the employee population. You may want to survey the group to find out their opinions about their current doctors, traveling to certain countries, and about health care in those countries. You may also want to find out how the group spends its health care dollars now and what types of incentives are most likely to work. The answers to these questions will help you build the right global provider network and design an appropriate beneficiary education campaign.
3. Build A Benefit Program That Responds To The Needs Of Your Beneficiaries
Armed with the information learned during the investigatory phase, build a benefit plan and a global provider network that reflects the needs and consumption patterns of the beneficiary population. For example, if you learn that the beneficiary population is generally over weight and has a proclivity for travel in Latin America over Asia, that information may be used to build a plan that encourages beneficiaries to investigate weight loss surgery in Costa Rica and Mexico. Surgeons in these countries are expert in bariatrics. You may also learn that your employee population is more likely to have orthopedic issues and favors Asia. In that case, a plan that highlights the orthopedic expertise of doctors in India, Singapore and Thailand is more likely to be utilized. Either way, the plan should specifically address the beneficiary population to increase the likelihood of utilization.
4. Educate Employee About The Benefits Of Medical Travel
Work closely with medical travel experts to design and implement a comprehensive employee education campaign that demonstrates the advantages of using foreign providers and the added incentives and benefits available through the medical travel plan.
5. Create A Tiered Provider Network
Create a tiered provider network that favors higher quality, lower cost providers with lower co-payments. Enrollees that select preferred foreign providers for specific treatments may have lower or no co-payments associated with that service. Tiered provider networks are a common health care benefit strategy that can be utilized to encourage beneficiaries to use foreign providers for certain services.
6. Increase Provider Transparency And Patient Responsibility
Increased transparency and patient responsibility enhances savings. Enrollees can make cost savings choices about whether or not to see a doctor (with information about disease self-management), which doctor to see (with information about provider quality, success rates, and costs), and disease treatment and management (with information about symptoms, treatments, risks, and costs). Plan providers should be encouraged to be transparent with their quality data and pricing. Giving enrollees the information necessary to make important care decisions aligns their interests with the payer. By aligning the interests of the consumer and payer, excesses can be eliminated and costs can be contained.
7. Implement Internet-Based Care Management Tools
Finally, easy-to-use internet-based care management tools encourage efficient use of wellness programs, on-line nurses, on-line training and more. Recent studies indicate that patients welcome more and better information that is easily accessible. Patients indicate that they will use salient and easy-to-use information to make informed choices about their health care consumption.* By making relevant information accessible and easy-to-use, patients can make more efficient health care consumption choices.
Conclusion
Consumer-driven health care is here to stay. The ability to maximize the benefit of cost containment strategies depends on the ability to innovate and respond to new information. Health care consumers should not be underestimated. They are discerning and scrutinizing. Their behavior is not monolithic. To predict future consumption, health care payers should carefully analyze beneficiary demographics and consumption patterns and employ sophisticated benefit design strategies that address those findings. Without a firm understanding of the covered population, incentives alone are insufficient to drive the kind of utilization necessary to realize measurable savings from medical travel.
* Consumer-Oriented Strategies for Improving Health Benefit Design: An Overview, Prepared by Stanford University-UCSF Evidence-based Practice Center, Stanford, CA for Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, July 2007.
About the Author
Medical travel expert Amanda Hayes-Kibreab helps Americans access premium medical care from some of the world's elite surgeons at value-based prices. Visit Global MD's website today at www.yourglobalmd.com and discover how Global MD can help you reduce healthcare costs and improve quality of care. Call today at 800-903-5690 to speak with an expert Care Coordinator about how we can help you and receive Global MD's Free Guide to Medical Travel.
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