A health coach is a wonderful asset to have when attempting to lower medical expenses for both yourself and your employees. The outdated trend of seeking a health coach for advice on exercise and diet alone fail to access all the resources a quality health coach should bring to the table. A health coach can serve as more than just a fitness and nutrition guru. Though those are important, a health coach can serve as an advocate for you in ways that extend from the refrigerator to your checkbook.
Proactive Care Plans: Your Health Coach Plans Your Strategy
A health coach creates a proactive care plan for your overall health needs, including risk assessments that can put you on-track to avoid unnecessary trips to the doctor or hospital. According to the CDC, reactive healthcare accounts for more than 75% of the nation’s health spending. Moving health care strategy from reactive to proactive health management means that instead of treating an ailment or disease, you practice self-care activities such as exercising, taking prescribed medications, drinking water, eating a healthy diet, getting annual physicals, and more. Through a personalized self-care plan, a health coach can help you position yourself to prevent disease, detect illness early, and improve your overall health.
Cost vs Quality: Your Health Coach is Your Guide
A health coach helps you navigate a confusing sea of out of pocket costs, insurance coverage, and cost quality care that might not be covered in-network. Cost of care delivery varies widely for like services within hospitals and physicians’ offices even within the same geographical locations, let alone across the country. Your cost could also be affected by which physicians or hospitals are in-network for your health insurance plan or by which procedures are not included in your insurance coverage. Additionally, physicians may be reimbursed differently by insurance companies for identical services simply based on the negotiating power of the insurance providers.
This is especially important for those who find themselves referred from rural community healthcare systems to larger commercial enterprise systems or those whose rural community hospitals have merged with larger corporate healthcare systems. Without the familiar relationships with the provider that are common in rural communities, there arises a need for assistance navigating a very impersonal and confusing conveyor belt of healthcare delivery. In the United States modern healthcare model, motivated more and more by business than care, your health coach can help you determine and achieve value-based outcomes that are on equal footing with the cost you pay. (CTA- You can learn more about what Curus is doing to aid our members with this in “Caught in “too big to care”?”)
Should I Stay or Should I Go Now? Your Health Coach Helps You Decide
A health coach can help you determine if you actually need a hospital stay or a specific procedure. This not only means they can they help you determine or appeal if a medical procedure is be deemed “medically necessary” by your insurance provider; your health coach can go further to help you determine if there is a better option for your health needs than the prescribed procedure. This often eliminates long, painful recoveries from needless procedures and the expenses that would have accompanied them. Most importantly, you can feel assured that your needs are the first priority in the decision you make.
The health coach of 2019 has to deliver more than just fitness and exercise plans.
At Curus, we’ve created a total package of service that will offer quality benefits for you or your team.
