Question

Manage Your Health, Inc. (MYH) is a Fortune 500 company that provides a variety of healthcare services across the globe. MYH has more than 20,000 full-time employees and more than 5,000 part-time employees. MYH recently updated its strategic plan; key goals include reducing internal costs, increasing cross-selling of products, and exploiting new Web-based technologies to help employees, customers, and suppliers work together to improve the development and delivery of healthcare products and services. Below are some ideas the IT department has developed for supporting these strategic goals:

Recreation and Wellness Intranet Project: Provide an application on the current intranet to help employees improve their health. A recent study found that MYH, Inc. pays 20 percent more than the industry average for employee healthcare premiums, primarily due to the poor health of its employees. You believe that this application will help improve employee health within one year of its rollout so that you can negotiate lower health insurance premiums, providing net savings of at least $30/employee/year for full-time employees over the next four years. This application would include the following capabilities:

Allow employees to register for company-sponsored recreational programs, such as soccer, softball, bowling, jogging, and walking.

Allow employees to register for company-sponsored classes and programs to help them manage their weight, reduce stress, stop smoking, and manage other health-related issues.

Track data on employee involvement in these recreational and health-management programs.

Offer incentives for people to join the programs and do well in them (e.g., incentives for achieving weight goals, winning sports team competitions, etc.).

Health Coverage Costs Business Model: Develop an application to track employee healthcare expenses and company healthcare costs. Healthcare premiums continue to increase, and the company has changed insurance carriers several times in the past10 years. This application should allow business modeling of various scenarios as well as tracking and analyzing current and past employee healthcare expenses and company healthcare costs. This application must be secure and run on the current intranet so several managers and analysts can access it and download selected data for further analysis. The new application must also import data from the current systems that track employee expenses submitted to the company and the company’s costs to the insurance provider. You believe that having this data will help you revise policies concerning employee contributions to healthcare premiums and help you negotiate for lower premiums with insurance companies. You estimate that this application would save your company about $20/employee/year for full-time employees over the next four years and cost about $100,000 to develop.

Cross-Selling System: Develop an application to improve cross-selling to current customers. The current sales management system has separate sections for major product and service categories and different sales reps based on those products and services. You see great opportunities to increase sales to current customers by providing discounts when they purchase multiple products and services. You estimate that this system would increase profits by $1 million each year for the next three years and cost about $800,000 each year for development and maintenance.

Web-Enhanced Communications System: Develop a Web-based application to improve development and delivery of products and services. There are currently several incompatible systems related to the development and delivery of products and services to customers. This application would allow customers and suppliers to provide suggestions, enter orders, view the status and history of orders, and use electronic commerce capabilities to purchase and sell their products. You estimate that this system would save your company about $2 million each year for three years after implementation. You estimate that the system will take one year and $3 million to develop and require 20 percent of development costs each year to maintain.

Create a brief description of the project that you might implement in order to "improve employee health."

Propose at least two solutions for reducing health care costs.

What can might you do to initialize and plan for the project?

Identify the stakeholders in this project.

Propose methods for engaging stakeholders to increase project awareness and buy-in.

To increase project awareness, propose at least two methods of engaging stakeholders immediately.

For the comment below, someone did answer this on another question/answer posted. I am looking for a different view from the nursing standpoint as I believe this will be a medical/IT project. Answers to the bolded questions will be fine.

Answer 1

The sucess of any healthcare organization depends on the adequate functioning and cooperation of its employees in meeting the preset goals. The health of the employees play a major role in delivering productive outcome in their workplace. Apart from the above stated plans for the improving the health of employees, I suggest another project which is cheaper and easier to maintain.

• Project of periodic health checkups and health record maintainence: This project aims at early identification of the unwell employees and delivering adequate medical facilities immediately as required. For this periodic health checkups are important. An initial health record should be prepared for each employees and the employees should be adviced to make a six monthly or annual checkups. This can be possible only if the company posses a staff clinic would be responsible for maintaince of health record of every staff and to refer cases if needed.

2) In order to reduce the healthcare cost, every healthcare institution should do the following things:

• Health education and couselling for employees on mainly those topics that are relevant in preventing disease causing agents in their work of department and the appropriate measures to be taken. Example: in a ward, the risk of diseases due to cross infection is high. Therefore the nurses are adviced to use personal protective equirement to prevent cross infection to clients as well as to themselves.
• Staff clinics for initial and periodic health checkups. Maintaining the health record of each employees and early identification of any diseases. Vaccination is also a important job responsibilities of the staff clinics. Example: The nurses are checked for their immunization status against Hepatitis B and if not vaccinated they are given timely vaccinations.

As a nurse, we should be aware about the various health hazards of the workplace and its preventive measures. Educating others about the importantance of maintaining such clinics should be described.

3) The stakeholders in this project are the Nursing personnels, doctors and the insurance company may be governmental or private agencies.

4) In order to engage the stakeholders, among nurses and doctors the skilled personnels in this field should be appointed. Their devotion and cooperation is important. More over should be able to communicate the benefits of the projects. In case of an insurance company, those agencies that are ready to blend themselves with the preset goals of the organization can be hired. The concepts and the promises of these agencies should be clear and should be easily accessibile in times of needs. In most of the companies emlpoyees do not relie on insurance policy because their procedure is too complicated to handle.