BlueInsightSM Online Tool From Blue Cross Blue Shield Of Arizona Improves Employers’ Ability To Manage Health Care Costs, Employee Wellness

August 5, 2008

PHOENIX – Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona (BCBSAZ) today introduced a new online tool that can give employers a competitive edge to make better, faster health care decisions to help manage health care costs and develop healthier, more productive employees.

BlueInsightsm is BCBSAZ's newest program designed to help manage health care costs and improve workplace productivity for Arizona employers.  It is available to organizations with 100 or more employees and is being offered as a value-added service to BCBSAZ large group clients. 

The online tool gives employers access to cost and utilization data that provides a roadmap to determine where to focus efforts for health and disease management. It also identifies the benefits employees are using most and areas where they can realize additional savings.  The data is delivered in aggregate format to ensure privacy of employees' health information and anonymity of individual employees.

According to Two Roads Diverged: Hewitt Associates LLC's 2008 Annual Health Care Survey 2008, employers are declaring that having healthy employees is one of their most important workforce issues. In response, employers are devising strategies to target specific populations for health improvement efforts.

The study found that nearly two-thirds of employers (63 percent) surveyed reported that they are increasing their reliance on health care data and measurement to find cost savings by adopting strategies over the next three to five years that incent healthy behaviors and use data technology to better manage risk.  Half (50 percent) reported that they will provided health and productivity programs that are tailored to their employees' risk levels.

"There can be vast differences in the demand for various types of benefits and in the overall health of companies' workforces," said Dick Hannon, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Provider Affairs for BCBSAZ.  "By being able to identify benefits that employees rarely or never use as well as key areas of health concerns, BCBSAZ can develop a customized benefit package for large employers that costs less and is more effective for their employees than a 'one size fits all' package.

BlueInsight provides access to hundreds of health care measures and reporting and analysis tools online.  By better understanding the employee population's health and health care usage trends, employers can identify top medical conditions and lifestyle risks affecting employees and better understand the conditions that are driving cost or are conducive to disease management. BlueInsight also identifies avoidable utilization and cost, such as the use of brand name vs. generic medications or use of in-network versus out-of-network health care providers. Finally, the tool allows employers to benchmark the health of their workforce against industry or like-sized employer benchmarks.  

Using this data, BCBSAZ data analysts can work with employers to develop customized benefit plans that focus on a company's unique needs, resulting in lower costs for the employer and a more effective benefit plan for positively impacting the health of employees.

About Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona, an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, is the largest Arizona-based health insurance company. The not-for-profit company was founded in 1939 and provides health insurance products, services or networks to more than 1.1 million individuals. With offices in Phoenix, Flagstaff, Tempe and Tucson, the company employs more than 1,500 Arizonans. For information about Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona and its community programs such as WalkingWorks, please visit www.azblue.com.