CoreSource News

CoreCare Hits The Self-Funded Marketplace Running

Most new products usually require a significant amount of time in the marketplace before sales activity begins to ramp up. Consumers are typically wary of being the first in line to see if a new product works as described. Not so with CoreCare.

After one month, CoreCare already covers more than 23-thousand plan members. Preliminary expectations for the new suite of total population management products were to have 25-thousand covered members by the end of 2008.

“I think we’ve hit a nerve in the marketplace,” said Rob Corrigan, Vice President, Product Development and Planning. “There’s probably more of an underlying need for CoreCare than we realized.”

“To be almost hitting our goal for 2008 after only four weeks in the marketplace is a pleasant surprise,” said Donna Heiser, Vice President, Healthcare Management.

Both Corrigan and Heiser think the early success of CoreCare is due in large part to the basic philosophy behind its design; help doctors treat their patients more efficiently and effectively by providing them with specific information to help plan members achieve an optimum state of health regardless of their current state of health.

“When we built this program,” Heiser said, “we considered every complaint we heard with outside disease management companies. Clients questioned the value, the cost and the lack of reporting with many existing programs. And they didn’t like the care not being local.”

So Heiser said CoreSource centered the program on the patient-doctor relationship, kept the price point low, and the reporting issues are being solved with D2Hawkeye.

“We’re encouraging face-to-face interaction between plan members and their doctors so that together, they can implement an effective treatment or preventive care plan,” Corrigan said. “We provide evidence-based recommendations that are specific to the healthcare needs of each plan member and we show our clients the results and the value they’re getting.”

Corrigan also said having CoreCare is a much better total cost containment story when compared to a multiple vendor approach. “We can do all of this by ourselves which is much easier and cleaner for our clients,” he said.

CoreCare is being offered to self-funded groups unbundled or as a comprehensive package. Both ways have been successful, so far.

Sandy O’Connor, Client Manager, Tinley Park, sold Sinai Health System, a 500-life group based in Chicago on the complete CoreCare package. “They like that we’re reaching out to all of their employees with health risk information about what they’re doing or not doing well,” she said. “For a couple more bucks a month, they’re getting an upgrade over the services they already were getting.”

Laurie Nase, Client Manager, Wayne, Penn., has sold two groups on CoreCare using the customized approach. Both, she said, like the idea of identifying high-risk plan members early and encouraging healthy employees to stay that way through preventive tests and screenings.

“Atlantic Health in New Jersey purchased CoreCare Healthy Benefits and CoreCare Monitoring,” she said. “They were looking to implement wellness and disease management initiatives in 2008, and see Healthy Benefits and Monitoring as building blocks to future initiatives. Atlas America, (an energy company based in Pittsburgh) purchased CoreCare Monitoring and CoreCare Focus to help their plan members with chronic diseases and their potential “high risk” risk members avoid high cost treatments.”