WeCare tlc — Your Health Risk Management Partner

WeCare tlc is a health risk management company that utilizes on-site or near-site health centers as platforms for improving your corporate population’s wellness and for decreasing your healthplan cost. WeCare tlc’s innovative and unique employee wellness model is designed around a concept that is completely opposite of what you may think. We believe that instead of treating the disease, we work to avoid the disease altogether. In order to do this, WeCare tlc leverages on-site or near-site primary medical health centers to deliver services to employees. Sometimes these medical homes are on-site and exclusive to one company and other times near-site and shared by several companies.

Once a company makes the positive commitment to focus on employee wellness and reduce healthcare costs, it will be on the road to becoming a healthier company overall. Not only will it be empowering its employees with a benefit that will change their lives, but also systematically reducing the company’s ongoing healthcare spend.

Your Employees’ Medical Home

Most corporate wellness centers open with a physician, a registered nurse and a medical assistant who all provide services to your employees. A typical employee wellness center will see urgent care as well as chronic care patients. Some of our health centers also provide occupational services which would include CDL exams with fit testing as well as drug testing. How you staff your health center is incredibly important in achieving the desired results; WeCare tlc is here to help guide you. For instance, if you use a nurse practitioner versus a medical doctor, then we would expect to be seeing mostly urgent care visits. If you have a medical doctor available in the health center for patients with chronic conditions, then you will see these people utilizing the health center more often and therefore achieving greater results and greater cost containment. WeCare tlc strongly recommends that every health center have a registered nurse. The purpose of the registered nurse is to ensure the employee wellness plan, outlined by the physician, is understood by the patient. Unlike most primary medical centers, our staff takes the time to ensure that every patient understands their condition as well as why they are getting certain medications. They also are coached on certain types of diet and exercise programs that are prescribed for them. Delivering a strong understanding of how their body will react to all the above and what health improvements they can expect to see is critical to our success. The medical assistant is also an integral part of the medical team. The medical assistant will room the patient, take vital signs and ensure the patient has a follow-up appointment. What is most important to remember is that WeCare tlc has the expertise to help you customize services and staffing that will meet your employees’ needs.

Lack of Transparency

It’s obvious that the healthcare industry in the United States suffers from a total lack of transparency, and it is very difficult to distinguish who is getting paid for what and how much they’re getting paid. So, when WeCare tlc got into this business, we felt the distinction between our product and our competition would be to guarantee that our prices would be transparent. By transparent, we mean that we do not add anything to the three major expense components of a clinic: staffing, labs, and medication. WeCare tlc guarantees that we have not added anything to those three expense components, and we provide our clients with copies of the invoices to support such charges.

Cost and Access Barriers to Your Employee Wellness Center

WeCare tlc’s primary objective is to remove all barriers to care for the patient/employee. The primary barriers to care for the patient would be the cost of a visit to the center and access to services the center offers. WeCare tlc removes these barriers by providing easy access to the medical center and no-cost visits. When employees do not have to spend their own money, they come to the health centers more often and take care of their health more diligently. WeCare tlc guarantees that if you need to see a doctor today for an urgent care visit, you will see the doctor today or tomorrow, depending if it’s very late in the day. WeCare tlc does not believe that you should have to wait two to three weeks to get an appointment with a doctor.

From the employer’s perspective, you will realize a much more defined cost for primary care and significantly reduced
costs for labs and reduced cost for pharmacy. In addition, we have a much lower rate of referral to specialists from our doctors in the healthcare center for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that our doctors have the time and expertise to provide a lot of extra services. In the current healthcare system, such services would be passed off to a specialist who would charge two to four times what a primary care doctor would charge. We also have a
significant reduction in urgent care visits and emergency room visits which all translate to the employer’s cost reduction.

Common questions about WeCare tlc’s corporate wellness solution.

When we meet with employers to talk about our program, there are several comments or questions that are frequently asked. Here are a few:

How is this any different from all of the other health plan savings programs that we’ve been introduced to over the past year such as managed care, preferred provider organizations and high deductible health plans?

All of those programs deal with treating the claim after the claim has already occurred. WeCare tlc’s program deals with trying to avoid the claim in the first place.

My people are different, they won’t come to the clinic.

WeCare tlc currently has healthcare centers that are being used by union employees, non-union employees, white-collar employees, blue-collar employees — employees representing almost every industry, and the results are consistently the same.

What if all of my employees already have primary care doctors?
The data proves otherwise. When we analyze the data, more than 40 percent of your employees, or any company’s employees, have not had a primary care doctor visit in the past two years. They may have been to a doctor, but it was an urgent care visit such as a Minute Clinic® or an emergency room visit — not a primary care doctor.

If we put this health center in, will we be upsetting the local medical community?
Initially, there may be some interest regarding the new employee wellness center from the local medical community, but the reality is the local primary care doctors are likely to already be overloaded with patients. In addition, it is important to remember, we still need all the hospitals and all the specialists to treat our employees. Once the clinic is open, we rarely get any comments from the medical community.

So, what are the expected results if you contract with WeCare tlc to install a health center for your company?
In the first year, we expect to get 65 percent of your employees using the center for a medical visit and about 50 percent of their dependents. We consistently achieve those result in all of our programs. By the second or third year, that 65 percent should grow to 75 percent or 80 percent, with the understanding that 10% to 15% of your people rarely go to any doctor whatsoever. This approaches nearly 100 percent of your eligible employees using the clinic, with their dependents’ participation increasing from 50% to roughly 65 percent to 70 percent in years two and three.

What exactly is your Healthcare ROI?

From a financial standpoint, we would expect in the first year that the addition of this program would negate all inflation on your health plan and should be able to cover the cost of your clinic. This means if we measure the cost per employee per month when we open the center, and we measure it at the end of the first year, those numbers should be consistent in the second and third year. We expect the numbers per employee per month to begin to decline so that by the end of the third year, you should see at least a 10 percent to 15 percent and sometimes even a 20 percent reduction in your health plan costs. There is no inflation cost of the clinic included the final statistic. Our data shows that when you open an employee wellness center with WeCare tlc, starting about the fourth to fifth year, the number of large claims in excess of $50,000 will frequently drop to about 50 percent of where it was at year one.

This means your members are getting healthier. And when you have healthy members, not only do you experience a decrease in health plan costs, but your employees gain by not having out-of-pocket costs for paying co-pays and deductibles. Our experience shows us that your employees will be happier and more productive living healthier lives. Once they reach retirement, those years become much more enjoyable due to their improved health. It’s a win-win for both the employer and the employee! In addition, this benefit profoundly affects employee retention and recruitment which translates into additional savings.

To learn more about how WeCare tlc can help lower your healthcare costs and help you create a more positive, healthy work environment, please call 1-800-941-0644 today.