In this stalled economy, companies are trying all kinds of things to avoid laying off employees. Firms have cut salaries or hours, or stopped paying into workers’ retirement accounts. One of the biggest corporate expenses is health care – and increasingly, companies are looking for ways to make it more affordable. One tactic has been to bring health care in-house. WUWM’s Erin Toner has this story.
“This is our lab area, and actually in the lab we can do any type of drawing of any blood, urine, we do pregnancy tests for employees here,” Cheri Pizzo says.
Cheri Pizzo is giving me a tour of the health clinic inside Rockwell Automation’s headquarters on Milwaukee’s south side. Pizzo works for Columbia St. Mary’s. It operates Rockwell’s clinic.
“And these are our exam rooms, and they’re the standard exam rooms, they have anything you’d see in any other doctor’s office,” Pizzo says.
Rockwell’s clinic has been around for 55 years, and you can tell by the sea foam green wall tile and original retro furniture. The cost of health care here is also kind of retro.
“They have a $5 fee to see an MD or a nurse practitioner and that’s the entire cost of their visit. A physical therapy appointment is $3 for a 45-minute visit,” Pizzo says.
Rockwell says the clinic’s goal has always been to make good medical care convenient and affordable for employees, so they remain healthy and productive.
Employee Brett Jorgensen might be exactly the person the company had in mind. This is his previous attitude toward health care:
“You know, being the standard male that I am, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” Jorgensen says.
But a while back, Jorgensen could no longer ignore his crushing headaches, blurred vision and numbness.
“I ended up with a brain tumor and had it removed. Had brain surgery, going through chemo and radiation now,” Jorgensen says. Jorgensen says he now regularly takes advantage of Rockwell’s in-house clinic.
“If I can just walk in here and see a physician and at least get a preliminary diagnosis, maybe I have to go someplace else depending on what’s going on, but at least I can figure out, you know, OK, I’m not dying,” Jorgensen says.
Jorgensen is among a growing number of adults who see a doctor at work, according to Michael Ratcliffe of the Massachusetts consulting firm, Fuld and Company. He says more than 1,000 large companies in the U.S. have on-site, primary care health clinics. They serve about 5 percent of the working population, but Ratcliffe says that number could grow to 15 percent by the year 2015.
“Since really the year 2000 there’s been a significant escalation of health care costs and employers are taking a look at how they can improve those and one way that’s become fairly obvious is that by putting health clinics on site they can potentially get some major benefits,” Ratcliffe says.
Ratcliffe says on-site clinics cut companies’ medical expenses between 10 and 30 percent by eliminating middlemen and overhead, and preventing ailments from worsening. He says there are also indirect savings.
“There’s one that’s called absenteeism, where people are away from work because they’re ill and they could be at work if they’d actually gone to the on-site clinic. The other one is ‘presenteeism,’ where they’re at work, but they’re not at full productivity, Ratcliffe says.
In addition to Rockwell, several other Milwaukee-area companies offer in-house health care, including MillerCoors, Briggs & Stratton and Quad/Graphics. Soon, Northwestern Mutual will follow suit.
“We’ve done research and know that certainly for every dollar that is spent on this there will be a significant return in terms of the value to the employee as well as the company,” says Jean Towell.
Northwestern Mutual Spokesperson Jean Towell says the company’s clinics will open in September, both at its downtown Milwaukee and Franklin locations. She says employees will be able to get routine physicals, vaccinations, and manage chronic conditions – all for a $5 co-pay.
“The individual has access to a 30-minute visit that looks at the whole patient, lifestyle, as well as whatever the particular issue is that the individual is dealing with at the time, so it’s really general, well-being care,” Towell says.
Towell says workers should not worry that private health issues will be shared with managers, because medical information will not be divulged to anyone else at the company.
John Neuberger is vice president of operations for QuadMed. That’s the in-house provider Quad/Graphics started 20 years ago, and is now marketing to other companies. It operates the clinics at MillerCoors and Briggs & Stratton. Neuberger says there’s been an explosion of interest in QuadMed’s services over the past couple of years.
“Employers are looking for alternatives, versus just the new health plan that comes out every year. This is to fundamentally change how health care is delivered to those employees, especially on a primary care basis,” Neuberger says.
QuadMed and other vendors are about to get hefty competition. The drugstore chain Walgreen Co. just bought two huge job-site health providers. A Walgreen executive told Bloomberg News the company may open “several thousand” workplace clinics in the coming years.
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