With commercial spending the bulk of the nation’s healthcare spending, it goes without saying that employers and healthcare purchasers are important stakeholders for driving improved healthcare quality, value, and health, most importantly at the local market level. However, healthcare purchasers are often missing from important community healthcare improvement conversations. The KHC Employer and Healthcare Purchaser Network is working to provide new opportunities and activities to better engage local employers and healthcare purchasers in these conversations.
Before we talk about these new KHC offerings, let’s start with the fact that the term “healthcare purchaser” is confusing at best. If you have ever attended a KHC event or a monthly meeting, you would hear the terms healthcare payer, provider, and purchaser used often, and you would also hear confusion and disagreement on the use of all of these terms. By the simplest of definitions, healthcare payers or plans pay for healthcare services, healthcare providers provide healthcare services, and healthcare purchasers (such as employers) purchase healthcare services for a set of covered lives.
One of the biggest challenges in working with healthcare purchasers is that they come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and perspectives with a unique set of challenges, goals, and needs. The KHC’s goal is to find areas where purchasers can best find value in coming together both separately and with other key healthcare stakeholders to drive improved health and healthcare.
To better communicate with employers and healthcare purchasers, the KHC, convened by UAW/Ford Motor Company, recently launched a newsletter with a monthly compilation of the most relevant data, news, and events for healthcare purchasers in Kentucky and Southern Indiana. Anyone interested in this more targeted newsletter may join by subscribing here.
There are two valuable events planned for the remainder of the year that we invite healthcare purchasers to attend:
- Understanding Employer Challenges, Goals, and Needs for Opioid Use Disorder will be held the morning of September 19, 2018. The KHC is seeking up to 25 employer and purchaser representatives to discuss the challenges, goals, and needs in addressing opioid use disorder (OUD) prevention, treatment, and recovery in their current and future workforce.
- The Path to Affordable Healthcare will be held on December 4, 2018. Achieving affordability will require focused efforts on three major drivers: health, price, and waste. The KHC will host an Affordability Summit with key healthcare stakeholders and like-minded local change agents to help develop an action plan to address healthcare affordability in our community.
If you are an employer or healthcare purchaser interested in learning more about the value of the KHC and its Employer and Healthcare Purchaser Network, we would be happy to schedule a meeting with you. The KHC’s current Employer Chairperson is Diana Han, Global Medical Director, GE Appliances, a Haier company. You may email the KHC at info@KHCollaborative.org. Brenda Miles, retired Benefits Director, Papa John’s International is available to meet with you.
