Knapheide cultivates a value-aligned primary care medical home for their employees through a WeCare tlc partnership

Explore how the national leader in trucking solutions improves healthcare outcomes and reduces medical plan costs with a near-site health center

Industry: Manufacturing 

Client: The Knapheide Manufacturing Company 

Location: Quincy, Illinois  

Serving: 1,400 employees

Benefits

• Improvement of healthcare outcomes
• Cost savings through affordable employee healthcare 
• Proximity to the health center 
• Ease of access to high-quality health care services
• Utilization of the health center as a recruitment tool 

Services

• Near-Site Health Center
  • Full suite of advanced primary care services, plus occupational health care and physical therapy services

Overview

Since 2014, the Knapheide Manufacturing Company (Knapheide) has provided their employees an easily-accessible primary care medical home through the Knapheide Family Wellness Center, a WeCare tlc near-site health center.  

The high-quality primary care solutions offered to employees through WeCare tlc has benefitted Knapheide through improved healthcare outcomes, cost savings of the medical plan, and utilization of the health center as a recruitment tool.  

The Knapheide Manufacturing Company

Founded in 1848 as a wagon manufacturer, Knapheide is currently the most popular manufacturer of work-ready vehicle solutions in North America. The trucking solutions company is unique for being privately held and solely operated by six generations of the Knapheide family for nearly 175 years. 

With a network of over 200 independent distributors and 25 Knapheide-owned locations across the country, there are more work trucks with the Knapheide name stamped on them on the road today than any other manufacturer. 

In addition to 1,100 other employees nationwide, Knapheide employs 1,400 workers at their manufacturing facility in Quincy, Illinois where the company’s corporate headquarters are also based.

Jim Rubottom, Vice President of Human Resources at Knapheide, was one of the principal advocates of opening an employer-sponsored health center for their employees in the Quincy area as part of the company’s commitment to investing in its employees and local Illinois community. 

Challenge

Prior to the clinic’s opening eight years ago, Jim and his team had long been searching for ways to solve Knapheide’s healthcare issues, including high cost of care, limited access to care, and poor quality of care that many businesses based in small towns like Quincy commonly face.

“In Quincy, Illinois, you don’t have competition in the healthcare arena. If we wanted to seek healthcare options before our clinic opened, we had to drive a minimum of two hours to get that care. The local hospital has a real monopoly on care in our area, so that’s been our battle for many years,” shares Jim.  

In the early 1990s, Knapheide formed a health coalition with four other companies in Quincy to combat the high costs of care for their employees against the hospital and urgent care clinics in town.

Shortly after forming, Jim and his fellow coalition members visited a leading home appliance manufacturer’s headquarters to tour their employer-sponsored clinic as part of their search for better care options. Once Jim saw all that the clinic offered, it became a dream of his to open one for Knapheide. 

Solution

In 2013, Jim was approached by WeCare tlc about opening an onsite or near-site health center for Knapheide.

“I really engaged with the WeCare tlc team because opening a clinic had been a dream of mine for about 20 years at that point,” explains Jim. “They had such a good sales presentation that showed they could offer what we were looking for, so we never looked at any of their competitors. We did our due diligence by talking to a handful of other satisfied employers that worked with them. I also formed a genuine relationship with the WeCare tlc leadership team which gave me a lot of confidence that our companies’ values were well-aligned,” Jim shares. 

In August 2014, Knapheide officially partnered with WeCare tlc and opened the Knapheide Family Wellness Center, located less than five miles from the corporate headquarters, as the first employer-sponsored health clinic in Quincy. 

With the full-suite of WeCare tlc’s advanced primary care services, the clinic offers Knapheide employees:

• Physicals and well-care consultations
• Acute and urgent care
• Chronic care management
• Disease management
• Care coordination
• Referral management
• Health coaching 
• Lab work services
• Onsite prescription drug dispensary
• Virtual care services
• Health and wellness screenings

WeCare tlc has also contracted with a local Quincy company to provide occupational health services and physical therapy for Knapheide employees through the clinic. 

The health and wellness center serves all Quincy area employees and their families on the Knapheide medical plan that reside within a 60 mile radius. They also provide all non-Quincy location employees with the option to utilize the wellness program.

Outcomes

Although use of the Knapheide Family Wellness Center is optional, nearly 70% of employees have utilized the clinic in some form, and many cite it as their primary healthcare provider. 

“The clinic has allowed us to get our employees involved in a primary care medical home to be treated before issues become more serious problems. It eliminates many barriers like copays and inaccessibility that drive people away from the care that they need,” Jim says in detailing the importance of primary care.

“The free prescriptions available to our employees at the clinic have also been a huge help in eliminating inaccessibility to care. Not having to go to the pharmacy or deal with long wait times is a huge plus that our employees really appreciate,” details Jim.  

The Knapheide Family Wellness Center has made a significant impact on the healthcare outcomes of its patients since its opening, a fact that Jim can personally attest to.

“When we opened the clinic, I took the biometric screening test that we do for all new patients, and my Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) test showed elevated numbers. The clinical team put me on a cycle to retest every six months, so about a year and a half later they told me to go see a specialist, and sure enough I had prostate cancer,” shares Jim. “If we had not had the clinic, I most likely wouldn’t have gotten my PSA tested let alone known I had prostate cancer. It would’ve progressed another three to five years before I noticed and it would’ve been a whole different world for me than getting it caught early for treatment.”

Over the years, the clinical team has successfully diagnosed new diabetics, caught many types of cancers in their early stages, and even made life saving diagnoses of urgent conditions like sepsis.

“We had an employee’s spouse several years ago who went in to see Dr. Richardson, the clinic’s physician, and he immediately sent her to the emergency room because she had sepsis. She would tell you to this day that Dr. Richardson saved her life,” details Jim. 

The preventative health care at the clinic is great evidence for the cost savings that Knapheide has benefitted from since opening the clinic. “The clinic undoubtedly lowers our medical costs,” states Jim. “Knapheide is an organization where you don’t have to get down to the nickels and dimes to prove the efficacy of certain initiatives, and we know there’s savings in programs you can never really put dollars and cents to by catching conditions before they become real problems.”

With data from WeCare tlc’s Clinical Analysis Toolkit (CAT), a report on the success of the Knapheide Family Wellness Center from the time period of 06/01/20 through 06/01/22 found:

Knapheide’s internal marketing team is very involved in promoting the health center to their employees through initiatives such as videos and sending out frequent communications about all that the clinic can offer. The clinical team supports these marketing efforts by going onsite to the Knapheide offices and manufacturing plant for Health Risk Assessment (HRA) events as well as engaging in other Knapheide events and meetings when possible.

Additionally, the clinic has a robust wellness program that has greatly improved clinic utilization rates by being available to all Knapheide employees across the country. 

“One Knapheide employee from Indiana participated in the wellness program for the first time this year and they found thyroid cancer through her labs, so she was very grateful to be able to utilize that benefit through the health center,” details Lori Mays, Senior Lead RN at the Knapheide Family Wellness Center.

The company’s marketing efforts and clinic’s wellness program play a significant role in increasing patient engagement, but Jim stresses that the medical staff at the clinic deserves much of the credit for its success. 

“The whole concept of being treated in a very family-friendly, accessible environment at the clinic is very big to the people we serve,” Jim explains. “In eight years, I can say that I’ve never gotten any complaints about our clinic other than people asking for more prescription medications or extended hours added to the clinic,” says Jim.

In addition to improving their healthcare offerings, the Knapheide Family Wellness Center effectively reinforces the values of the Knapheide family and their company.

“The Knapheide family is very people-oriented and want to make sure their employees are taken care of as best they can and the clinic has become a big part of that. Our CEO has gotten a lot of positive feedback from the community about being impressed that he had started a clinic for his employees, so that has only reinforced what we’re doing,” explains Jim. “It’s like this: We have to buy steel because we can’t build our products without steel. We need to provide our WeCare tlc clinic because we can’t run Knapheide without our clinic. It’s in the fabric of our company.”

Next Steps

Moving forward, Jim and his team are interested in offering mental health services at the clinic. “Medications to treat anxiety and depression are one of the top prescriptions dispensed through our medical plan, so we’re interested in exploring the mental health services WeCare tlc offers at their clinics to see how we can further support our employees overall well-being,” Jim says.

In addition to the mental health support, Knapheide is always looking for more ways to provide care to their employees outside of the Quincy area. “We’ve offered free diabetic medications and supplies through the clinic since the day we opened, but we recently branched that out so that our employees across the country could access it through their pharmacy benefit manager (PBM). That decision has helped influence us to consider what else we can do for our non-Quincy location employees in the future,” shares Jim. 

Final Thoughts

“The biggest part of our success is the positive reputation for comfortable and capable care that the clinical team has with our employees and their families. The overall relationship that we have with our medical staff and WeCare tlc’s home office team is greatly appreciated. We’re very, very satisfied with our clinic,” concludes Jim. 

“Our clinic is unique because you can get out of your car and it’s ten steps to the door, you can have a lab drawn and be out in five minutes, and our staff greets most people by name because they know who they are,” explains Lori of why people are thankful for the clinic.

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