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Pittsburgh Business Group on Health
Employers must push for more cost-effective
health care
Need/Opportunity
Rising healthcare costs continue to be a top concern for employers,
and improving the delivery and quality of health care is often discussed
as a way to reduce those costs. When a Pennsylvania Health Care
Cost Containment Council (PHC4) report showed that insurers made
widely differing payments to hospitals in Western Pennsylvania for
the same cardiac procedures, regardless of the outcomes, employers
were hit with yet another concern about their employee health plans
and the quality of the services they are buying. Highmark, the region's
dominant insurer, PHC4, and the two largest healthcare providers
- UPMC and West Penn Allegheny Health System - were central to the
ongoing media coverage and dialogue. The employer's voice was largely
unheard.
The Pittsburgh Business Group on Health is an employer-led coalition
advocating for value and quality in health care and benefits. As
such, PBGH needed to join the public discussion about the cardiac
surgery reimbursement report. With such corporate heavyweights as
H.J. Heinz Company, Westinghouse Electric Company and Bayer Corporation
among its roster of members, PBGH should be viewed as a major player
in the healthcare cost debate.
The PHC4 study presented a clear opportunity to raise PBGH's visibility
and position itself in the employer community's eyes as a driver
of value and quality in health care and benefits. It also presented
the opportunity for the collective voice of regional employers -
spoken through PBGH - to call for greater transparency in healthcare costs and quality.
Intended Audiences
- Executive decision makers at large, mid-size and
small organizations in various business segments, including private
and public employers, government and academia.
- Executives at regional health systems
- Executives at regional health insurers
- Employee benefits experts
- Healthcare consultants
Objectives
Through a wide-reaching forum, PBGH aimed to insert itself into
the specific public discussion of cardiac surgery reimbursement
while using the issue as a springboard to broach the broader topic
of transparency in the cost and quality of health care. In doing
so, it hoped to raise its level of visibility among its audiences
and demonstrate its value as an advocate to existing members.
PBGH planned to:
- use the issue to bridge to discuss the power of
an employer coalition;
- communicate to prospective members the cost savings
they can achieve in prescription drug and health benefits through
PBGH plans; and
- demonstrate to its audiences the relationships
and leverage PBGH can achieve with regional health insurers and
prescription drug plans.
Project Description
WordWrite Communications employed its experienced staff of media
relations experts and former journalists to first pitch the opinion
piece idea to select media.
Having gotten strong interest from the media pitching efforts, WordWrite
worked with PBGH to draft a concise, clear opinion piece and letter
that addressed the findings in the PHC4 report from the employer
perspective. Both pieces highlighted PBGH and its work on behalf
of employers while tying the report's findings to the crisis
in healthcare costs.
Both articles made the point that inequality in reimbursement for
healthcare services, regardless of quality, contributes to escalating
healthcare costs. The pieces questioned the justification for the
differences in payments and called on employers to act by using
their collective power to ensure that their employees received quality
health care at fair prices - in essence, a call for transparency.
Results
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette printed a 650-word opinion piece under
PBGH Executive Director Chris Whipple's byline. The article ran
in the Forum section of the Sunday edition, reaching an estimated
842,755 readers. The piece also was posted to the Post-Gazette's
web site, which attracts an estimated 3.2 million unique users per
month.
The Pittsburgh Business Times printed a 500-word letter to the editor,
reaching 12,500 subscribers and 45,000 overall readers, the majority
of whom are considered top management in their respective organizations.
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