If you are an employer looking to manage spending on healthcare, then a strategy around diagnostics can help optimize your: Pharmacy spending, out of pocket employee costs, hospitalization costs, and total health costs.

How? Diagnostics are used and developed for many applications in healthcare, including: to accurately diagnosis diseases, to determine stage and severity of diseases, to determine what drugs might be beneficial or what drugs could cause a severe adverse reaction, to determine if a patients genetic profile makes them susceptible to certain diseases —and how to mitigate those risks, and to determine if a person’s genes makes them more or less likely to respond to a particularly drug or therapeutic intervention. The use of diagnostics in this manner is sometimes referred to as ‘Precision Medicine’, and when diagnostics are applied correctly, can dramatically reduce healthcare costs and improve patient outcomes.

In our healthcare system, incentives are not always aligned for optimal care or the most efficient use of economics. For example, in 'Imprecision Medicine' (see below), diagnostics may indicate a less expensive drug would be more effective, but in practice a more expensive one is prescribed, or diagnostics may diagnose diseases earlier when they can be better managed, both financially and physically. Diagnostics also determine the risk for performing a procedure, giving the patient insight to make the best decision. 

Employers are becoming more savvy about taking diagnostic decision making in their own hands to ensure optimal decision making capabilities for their employees. 

Employers

Employers  |  employers benefit groups  |  benefit coalitions

49% of Americans, receive health insurance through employers, that’s approximately 150 million people. Employers spend nearly $1.2 trillion on healthcare annually, and for most employers healthcare spend is the second highest line item expense behind salary.

75% of employer-sponsored health plans are self-insured, which allows employers to customize offered benefits and take on calculated financial risk, as compared to fully-insured plans where employers purchase a “one-size-fits-all” plan with high premiums that may or may not fit the needs of their particular demographic.

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We are using the smartest drugs on the planet in the worst possible way—trial and error.

— Craig Leonardi, MD, Dermatologist