Healthcare: education, intranets driving decisions.

As more U.S. companies embrace health care consumerism to help stem rising costs, they are placing far more emphasis on employee education and the technologies that facilitate better employee decision making, according to experts and research from Watson Wyatt Worldwide.

A recent survey of more than 550 large employers by Watson Wyatt and the National Business Group on Health shows a sharp increase in the number of companies providing detailed information to help employees become better health care consumers:

Percent of Employers Providing Employees with Information On:

Specific Health Issues
2003    38%
2004    42%
2005    71%

Provider and/or Hospital Quality
2003    16%
2004    23%
2005    35%

Healthcare Service Unit Price
2003     4%
2004    11%
2005    20%

With the advent of health savings accounts (HSAs), employees also have a far greater need for sophisticated financial analyses of their health plan choices. In the recent Watson Wyatt/National Business Group on Health report, 28 percent of employers now say they offer tax-impact modeling via the Web, and 18 percent offer utilization-based modeling to help employees compare plan choices, given their likely health care needs.

"The shift to consumer-directed health care won't be easy, but it is a process that can be managed," Watson Wyatt says. "In the end, consumer-directed health care is all about person-alization of information, and the Web can deliver that efficiently, affordably and successfully."