The latter is a new program at Cerner Corporation with the objective of helping companies and their employees achieve the former.

Like companies in other markets nationwide, Kansas City’s employers, big and small, have responded to rising healthcare costs by encouraging their employees to take more responsibility for their own healthcare, in part by providing incentives and opportunities for workers to improve their own health through participation in well- ness and prevention programs. Cerner is a leader in this movement, both in the programs it offers its own workforce, but also in programs it is now marketing to other employers.

  The stated mission of Cerner’s Healthe employee program is to “coordinate the resources, deliver the knowledge and connect the individual, family and clinicians at the appropriate time and location to achieve the optimal health outcomes.”

Cerner CEO Neal Patterson puts it more bluntly. “We are truly trying to disrupt the healthcare industry.” 

In practice, Cerner’s Healthe Clinics have radically transformed the company’s relationship with its employees and has, in the process, created a model it hopes will transform the way other companies manage their employee healthcare costs.

Cerner spokesperson, Kelli Christman, says that beginning in January 2007 the company scrapped its traditional HMO and PPO employee health insurance plans. In their place employees were offered an HSA—a health savings account in which money is set aside in a special account to be used by the employee for healthcare expenditures—or an HRA—a healthcare reimbursement account through which employees are reimbursed for their healthcare expenses.

The key to this program is a fully-automated, paperless, entirely re-engineered, on-campus primary care system. The centerpiece of this system is a care suite in which doctors and employees discuss health issues at a more deliberate and relaxed pace, with an emphasis on maximizing health, as opposed to treating symptoms.

Another main feature of the program is a wide array of fitness and wellness programs, many of which are designed to successfully prevent or manage six specific health conditions—diabetes, cancer, asthma, lower back pain, cardiac disease, and depression.

“We know that 43% of our healthcare costs in 2006 were related to these six conditions,” says Christman. “If we can reduce our expenditures in those areas it can have a dramatic effect on our healthcare costs overall.”

As you might expect from the worldwide leader in healthcare information systems, the outcomes of Cerner’s Healthe programs are carefully measured and documented. In the nine months its Healthe program was operational in 2006, the firm saw net savings of $650,000. The company projects savings of $1.6 million in 2007. 

Telecom giant Sprint is also an innovator in the field of employee health and wellness programs. Its program, Sprint Alive, offers employees a wide range of services, many provided on its Overland Park campus. These include health risk assessments, weight management and nutrition coaching, blood pressure and cholesterol management, information and support related to a wide range of health conditions and diseases, back pain management, stress management, smoking cessation, and regular health information newsletters and updates on dedicated Web sites. Sprint’s campus also features a health clinic staffed by both physicians and nurses to address employees’ immediate primary care needs, as well as a state-of-the-art fitness facility open to all employees.

Sprint has also identified that a large percentage of its healthcare costs are related to specific health conditions, and it, too, offers employees programs designed to manage and mitigate these. In Sprint’s case the conditions are asthma, cancer, coronary artery disease (CAD), congestive heart failure (CHF), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), depression, diabetes, and low back pain.

Have these corporate health and wellness programs achieved their objectives? And have they positively impacted overall healthcare costs? Sprint and Cerner say they have.

But the experience of companies nationwide is less compelling.

The Kaiser Family Foundation, the non-profit health research and education trust, reports that, in 2006, among companies that offered disease management programs to their workers, only 28% believed that these programs were “very effective.” However, 54% felt they were “somewhat effective.”

But, among smaller firms, those with fewer than 200 workers, only 17% thought that the disease management programs they provided their employees were “very effective,” and only 43% said they were “some-what effective.”

Perhaps most telling, of the larger organizations only 5% said that the programs were “not at all effective,” but 19% of smaller companies felt that their disease management pro-grams were “not at all effective”—2% more than those who thought such programs were “very effective.”

The presence of Fortune 500 companies with large workforces in the Kansas City region has created an environment locally in which the creation of new, innovative, even radically dif-ferent approaches to the complex problems of healthcare costs can be—must be—attempted. Cerner has seen sufficient success with its Healthe initiative that it has decided to market the program to other companies seeking to lower their costs. The ex-perience of the companies surveyed by the Kaiser Foundation would seem to indicate that there’s significant market potential for programs that are more than “somewhat effective.”