Long before meaningful use and patient engagement became part of the popular parlance in the realm of healthcare IT, Boston-based EMC Corp., which describes itself as a global leader in enabling businesses to transform their operations, launched a transformation initiative of its own.
Today, 10 years later, the self-insured employer of more than 25,000 people, is boasting about its healthier workforce and $300 million in savings from its 10-year data analytics project.
Delia Vetter, senior director, benefits and programs at EMC, was there at the start. She says by employing analytics and engaging employees in their own healthcare, EMC has realized:
• Savings of $455 per person for the cohort of employees completing the HRA in each of the last 3 years
• Decrease in employee stress and depression, tobacco use and improvements in physical activity levels
• Increase in knowledge of health among employees, as evidenced by an increase in awareness of biometric measures
• Elimination of at least one health risk factor - diet, physical activity, weight, emotional health and addiction - among the 68 percent of employees engaged in health coaching.
The employee healthcare program came about because back in 2002 EMC was looking for a way to contain healthcare costs.
"One very important thing is that we did not want to shift costs to employees," says Vetter, "because in the long term, it makes you uncompetitive, and you don't want to pass the burden onto employees."
"At the time we weren't very sophisticated in the sense that we didn't understand the health of our population, what was driving costs," she recalls. "We didn't have data available to really understand the health of the population. The health plan would provide us data on a quarterly basis, but it was very fragmented. So it was very difficult to pinpoint what are the chronic conditions that we need to focus on, or lifestyle health risks.
EMC soon partnered with Ingenix, which today is OptumInsight, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group. This gave EMC some of the analytics capability it needed, and then EMC added a patient portal powered by WebMD. The portal, called HealthLink, provides what Vetter calls "a very personalized environment for individuals and family members."
Perhaps more important than the technology was employee buy-in. Vetter and her team started at the top, engaging the executive suite and taking the concept of individuals taking charge of their across the enterprise to all employees.
"We wanted to create a very consumer-centric mindset," Vetter says, "and to help employees understand that healthcare does not cost just the $10 co-payment, and that we're a self-insured entity. It's EMC dollars. We're not buying an insurance product. It impacts shareholder value; it impacts the bottom line."
In 2008, EMC became the first to collaborate with its Boston neighbor Center for Connected Health, a division of Partners HealthCare, on an initiative to demonstrate that employees diagnosed with hypertension could better manage their health through proactive monitoring and education. The program called SmartBeat used a wireless blood pressure cuff and communicator, and an Internet-based feedback system, to help participating employees self-manage their high blood pressure.
Vetter saw the program as a natural extension - a complement to EMC's healthcare strategy.
Employees took to it, too.
"The ability to track readings and the feedback you receive with the website are really the keys to success for me," Scott Cote, an EMC software engineer, said at the time. "I know that when I eat certain foods, my blood pressure will rise. I'm able to control my blood pressure now through diet. The SmartBeat program is a great incentive for employees, and I think it is one of the best benefits EMC offers to help make employees healthier."
"I was thinking of monitoring my blood pressure anyway. When I heard about the SmartBeat program, I figured that I would be more likely to do it on a regular basis," added Amir Sharif, a development manager at EMC. "In addition to monitoring my blood pressure, I changed my diet and exercise program, to see if that would have an effect on my blood pressure. And, in fact, my blood pressure is down considerably, moving in the right direction."
Joseph Kvedar, MD, founder and director of the Center for Connected Health gave EMC kudos for "its vision and commitment to help employees improve their overall health and to accelerate the adoption of innovative healthcare technology to better the lives of its employee population."
At EMC, Vetter says, the employee healthcare program became more sophisticated as EMC was able to mine and analyze more data, add to its personalized portal and provide more information and education through its targeted monthly workshops started in 2003. The workshops are also recorded and filed in a library for those who can't attend in person.
"This type of approach taking data and connecting it with a personalized portal, we were the first employer to make this integration," Vetter notes.
All of those efforts together, she says, have led to better physical health for EMC employees and a better bottom line for EMC.
"When you do something very consistently - over a period of 10 years, as we have - that's very targeted with the data analytics, employees are engaging," Vetter says.