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Two Minutes on Hospital Employee Health Michael Taylor, MD, FACP Chief Medical Officer Truven Health Analytics
At Truven Health we have a large
database called MarketScan database and we can use it for a variety of
research. One area of research that we've been interested in
is looking at the health of hospital employees. It's important because as
hospitals
move into more risk contracting and away from fee-for-service,
it's important they really control their costs well, that they have healthy,
productive employees.
We looked at a series of hospitals that are in our database to understand
what the health of these employees-- hospital employees were as compared to
the general health of the general population. We had over
a million hospital employees in the database that we could look at and what we
found
was that although they were not necessarily older than the average
commercial database people, they
definitely had higher health risks they had up some funny utilization patterns
they
typically had lower primary care visit rates,
higher emergency room rates, higher in- patient admission rates,
and longer lengths of stay. They had a higher burden of several
diseases,
including athsma, depression. What we've done is
use that information to get back to hospitals to say
as your marketing up in learning how to take care of populations with the whole
population health model,
a good place to start is to look at your own employees and understand where their
risks are
and understand how to better manage their risk; have a healthier, more
productive employee population
of your own and then take those learnings out in the community
and out to businesses in your community and be able to serve those populations
from a
community-wide perspective. What's changing for hospitals is that they used to
get paid
for the best for basically, but now as the markets are coming around, hospitals are
being asked and challenged to
actually care for the communities at large and be held accountable for
keeping them healthy.
For more information, contact truvenhealth.com