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Healthcare Leaders Gather in Cville to Talk Team Member Wellness

Several prominent health systems have spent the past several years working to improve and reduce healthcare costs. The starting point? Their own employees.

UVA Health System was one of several members of the Health Employer Exchange (HEE) to gather in Charlottesville recently to share successes and best practices for helping to improve the health of their employees. The goal is to reduce the burden of chronic diseases and improve employees’ health and wellbeing, which in turn reduces the cost of healthcare.

Among those who came to Charlottesville were:

“The Health Employer Exchange is a collaborative of academic medical centers that have come together to put our hands around improving the health of our workforce – particularly, to focus on keeping our healthy employees well, and to reverse chronic health conditions that our employees suffer from,” explains Richard Shannon, MD, UVA Executive Vice President for Health Affairs and Chair of the HEE Oversight Committee.

Shannon explains that there are two reasons why employers are placing increased focus on the health of their employees:

The relationship between the HEE and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Shannon explains, is linear.

The ACA is about creating “population health,” which means striving to keep people healthy to minimize chronic conditions that become costly at an advanced stage, such as advanced heart failure and advanced liver failure. Organizations that have shown that they can successfully take care of their own workers and prevent the advancement of chronic health conditions can apply those same lessons to the general public. “Learning how to do this well allows us to apply those very same lessons to the general population and really affect the kind of reform and delivery system that we hope will make a healthier America,” says Shannon.

Here is a list of the three main topics discussed at the recent HEE meeting in Charlottesville:

So, what’s next? Members of the HEE will take the information and lessons learned at the meeting and put it into practice in their own existing platforms. Then, in six months or so, they’ll reconvene to share whether or not those methods have been effective. Shannon calls this a “continuous learning network” that is ongoing, and the results have the potential to extend beyond healthcare companies. “Our goal is to make healthier workers everywhere, and to share these lessons as soon as they’ve been proven to work,” he says.

Listen to Dr. Shannon’s recent interview with Charlottesville’s NewsRadio WINA regarding the Health Employer Exchange.