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There are 50 million parents in today’s workforce and more dual-earner households, single parent homes and female breadwinners in 2018 than ever before.

Despite this, a recent survey from Ovia Health featured in NBGH’s recently released Parent Package found that only 65 percent of women working at companies with 1,000 or more employees feel supported in balancing their work and family lives.

According to a study published this month, physicians estimate that 20.6% of overall medical care is unnecessary. Researchers from Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine interviewed 2,106 doctors from across the United States, asking them about the prevalence and causes of overtreatment.

Accountable care organizations (ACOs) are being considered as one the key strategies in the next frontier of efforts to improve health care delivery and control health benefit costs. Roughly one in four large employers plan to pursue an ACO strategy in 2017 and that number is expected to grow in the coming years. However, employers have many questions about how ACOs deliver value better than the network models they offer today. To help employers better understand and evaluate ACOs in their markets, two groundbreaking tools have been released by the National Business Group on Health.

The CDC estimates¹ that one in 68 children has autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and diagnoses continue to rise. Whether that’s due to increasing prevalence or more accurate diagnosing, large employers must have a strategy for supporting plan members with ASD and the employee caregivers who assist them. 

You can help the Business Group by supporting The Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network (LAN), an initiative launched by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2015 to align stakeholders across sectors in moving payment from traditional fee-for-service (FFS) methods to ones linked to quality and alternative payment models (APMs). The LAN’s next initiative will focus on providing support and resources to drive improvement in maternity care outcomes via episode payments.

Patient (or “copay”) assistance programs and coupons present a bit of a double-edged sword. While they help facilitate payment for certain drugs, they also complicate the payment process immensely. Both help patients ultimately gain access to expensive drugs that otherwise may not be affordable. However, the intention behind each approach differs considerably, as does the overall impact.

Large employers have more potential partners than ever to choose from to connect employees to high-value care. The Business Group’s Marketplace identifies dozens of vendors that provide second-opinion services, transparency tools, medical decision-support programs, disease management and several other condition-specific programs. Dozens more exist and startups looking to partner with large employers are being created regularly. 

In today’s workplace, more generations are working side-by-side than ever before, with the largest portion of the U.S. labor force made up of millennials (34%), Generation X (34%) and baby boomers (29%).¹ To best support the needs of a multigenerational workforce, employers should consider taking a refreshed look at how they develop benefits and programs, with an eye to what is most important to employees at each life stage.