IHPM Establishes New Employer Leadership Group for Health Management; Employers Coalesce To Establish Strategy to Realize Greater Value From Consumer-Centric, Population Health Improvement Initiatives.

PHOENIX -- Sean Sullivan, president and CEO of the Institute for Health and Productivity Management (IHPM), today announced the creation of an Employer Leadership Group (ELG) to be the proactive "customer" group of IHPM's Health Management Strategic Advisory Council (HMSAC).

The ELG is charged with keeping the health management needs of employers, as the ultimate customer, in the forefront of the HMSAC agenda to realize greater value from population health improvement initiatives. These initiatives should incorporate both integration of health and disease management programs and redesign of benefits.

"Employers finally are asserting themselves as the purchasers of health services rather than just the payers of the bill for these services. The ELG is an expression of this emerging new truth that will change the system at last," said Sullivan.

The HMSAC was established before IHPM's inaugural conference last March in Orlando, Florida on Care-Focused Disease Management at Work -- originally as the Disease Management Strategic Advisory Council. One of the ELG's first actions was to change the "Disease" to "Health," to expand the focus to include wellness and prevention -- encompassing total health management.

Employer members of the ELG include human resources executives, benefits directors, corporate medical directors and health and productivity executives from 3M, American Standard, Avaya, Deere & Co., Dow Chemical, Eastman Kodak, Ford Motor Company, General Mills, Intel, International Truck and Engine, Lockheed Martin, Molson Coors, Pitney Bowes, PPG Industries, The Proctor and Gamble Company, and Waste Management.

The ELG will seek opportunities to integrate benefit design with health improvement and care management to realize the best returns on employer investments in workforce health. It will show employers how to avoid costs rather than struggling futilely to control them, and to move beyond clinical to functional outcomes that translate into larger cost savings through workplace productivity gains.

Through the ELG, purchasers also will urge the provider members of the HMSAC to adopt principles and practices enabling evaluation of defined population health improvement programs on a comparable basis. Employers discussed this subject with Thomas Wilson, PhD, CEO of the Population Health Impact Institute, and the ELG soon will be issuing a statement on issues such as "transparency" and validity of methods used to evaluate program results.

Creation of the ELG was approved by IHPM's Board of Directors at its June 16, 2005 meeting in Chicago: employers then were joined by health plans, pharmaceutical firms, medical and behavioral health companies, health promotion and wellness providers, and disease management companies for a meeting of the full HMSAC. The group agreed to continue holding an annual health management conference to give employers practical, reliable and integrated answers to their most critical workforce health issues -- reduction of health risk factors, prevention of serious medical and behavioral health problems, and coordination of care for chronic conditions and disabilities. The Second Annual Health Management Conference -- Making Health Management Work: Reaping the Benefits of Healthy Behaviors will be held March 29-31 in Orlando at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Hotel.

Les C. Meyer, Chair of HMSAC, described its work this way: "To apply the lessons learned from real-time market innovation and demonstration projects with employers and other stakeholders, by implementing best demonstrated health management practices in other companies and communities."

About IHPM

The Institute for Health and Productivity Management (IHPM) is a global enterprise created in 1997 to establish the full value of employee health and maximize its impact on business performance. It does this by helping employers to identify the total cost impact of employee illness on business performance; choose the best opportunities to reduce this cost impact and improve performance; and measure the success of their efforts.