The fastest-growing segment of wellness/disease management – or “population health management” as some call it — is among self-insured employers. Along with claims of medical costs savings, employers who institute these programs are being told that there is a "soft" benefit of reduced absenteeism. Together, as the story goes, these two benefits make for a powerful value proposition.

DMPC both procures programs that offer those value propositions and evaluates the outcomes of those programs.

I: PROCUREMENT

Employers have two options to procure their PHM:

1. They can go through their existing health plan(s)
2. They can procure on their own.

There is a large range of mostly situational advantages and disadvantages to each, which we would be happy to elaborate on.

One other choice employers have is whether to join the Disease Management Purchasing Consortium or use a benefits consultant. The best argument for using the benefits consultant is, if you don't spend enough money doing this procurement this year, your budget for benefits consulting next year will be reduced accordingly. DMPC simply costs less…and yet if you look at the programs that have garnered the most awards for excellence, such as Procter & Gamble’s, they were procured or validated by DMPC.

All the arguments go in favor of joining the DMPC:

1. Experience—roughly 40% of all major PHM contracts have been sourced through us
2. Experience—while several benefits consulting firms have assisted more employers than we have, individually no consultant has remotely as much experience as the DMPC founder who will be working with you.
3. Reputation—we are ranked #1 in every survey by Managed Healthcare Executive and are the organization that 200 people have turned to in order to receive their own certification in Critical Outcomes Report Analysis
4. Purchasing Power—Extensive database of all vendors and repeated outsources allow us to obtain the lowest fees
5. Price—Contact us for specific quotes but generally about one-third of what a benefits consultant charges
6. Lack of bias—a benefits consultant gets paid much more to outsource than to say, "your own health plan's program is good." We get paid the same amount and so can evaluate all options fairly.
7. In-depth knowledge of almost all major health plans' programs. We know which are good and which aren't…and there is huge variation among them.

Finally, only DMPC provides an “auditor’s letters” attesting to the validity of the savings that you are being told you are receiving, because only DMPC’s outcomes measurement metrics are valid enough to support an “auditor’s letter. We guarantee your results. No benefits consultant does that.

II EVALUATION

DMPC is the world’s leader in program evaluation. DMPC is the only organization whose metrics for measuring financial outcomes are valid. And if that isn’t the undeniable truth, we invite any and all of our competitors to sue us.

We don’t just make this claim. We guarantee it. When we do an outcomes evaluation for you, we provide an “auditor’s letter” at the end with a guarantee of $10,000 to $100,000 that our conclusions are valid. If indeed we reach the conclusion that your program is working, you then know that you can rely on that conclusion.

The reason we can do this is that we invented a methodology that measures utilization validly over time (for either wellness or disease management), and avoids the fallacies of pre-post measurement. Employers using this methodology routinely win “Best Employer in Disease Management” awards from the Health Industries Research Co., and this metric is the most widely used in the entire health plan universe.

Why don’t more employers use it absent our involvement? We have two theories:

1. Benefits consultants do not attend the DMPC webinars or conferences on measurement for some reason. Without attending them, there is no way of learning about it.
2. Benefits consultants have learned about it, but don’t use it because its simplicity and validity obsolete their methodologies. Telling their clients about this methodology would result in their evaluation fees declining by 50% or more.

Whatever the theory, this is not a he said-she said. We guarantee validity, and they don’t.