The Personal Impact of a VIP Patient Experience

I was in my third term as mayor of the city of Rockford, Illinois when we had experienced so much failure in employee health that we were willing to try something fundamentally different.

Employee healthcare costs became an issue immediately after I was first elected in 2005. We were headed into union bargaining sessions with a financial mandate to right the balance sheet, which required us pushing for significant increases in member contributions. For years, the city had kept member premium contributions artificially low by borrowing money from our general fund to cover the differential.

Those bargaining sessions became battles and were a challenge for both labor and management. But we eventually got it done. Our health fund balanced and we built a reserve because members were paying more. But despite labor concessions, we saw our healthcare spend keep going up over the years that followed, which was a lose-lose proposition for both labor and management. While healthcare costs themselves were definitely part of the problem, we came to recognize a more fundamental challenge — that so many of our people suffered from costly chronic disease. I became convinced that we needed to do something radically different, like run our own employee health center.

The process of selecting a clinic vendor was eye opening. I got directly involved. All three of our local hospital systems participated as well as a number of national vendors. One of the main themes that emerged from the interview process with the hospital systems was their purported advantage of already being present in the community, with a number of primary care health centers and staff located across the area.

That made sense at some level. But wasn’t that always the case? If that alone was enough, we wouldn’t be in the situation we were in. The challenge wasn’t proximity. It was access and approach. In other words, we were trying to disrupt a fee-for-service model that those hospital systems admitted incentivized volume over value and disease over health; a system where a member could get an appointment for urgent care at most anytime but preventive care appointments took months to schedule. What would be different this time?

I remember one hospital system indicated that they could treat City of Rockford members differently utilizing an existing primary care facility. Our employees would be treated as “VIP” members with preferred scheduling, reduced wait times, and zero co-pay or deductible. The thought was intriguing, until I put myself in the position of being a patient in a waiting room filled with other patients. How would it look to the average citizen watching City of Rockford employees get preferential treatment — going to the head of the line amid a room full of other patients? Not so good I thought. Moreover, how much time and attention could a provider realistically provide to a City of Rockford employee when they felt the pressure to serve other waiting patients? This discussion ultimately led me to Marathon Health.

What was the difference with Marathon Health? Marathon Health operates on a value-based care model, and not fee-for-service. In this model, every patient gets the same care. Patients are treated like VIPs. There is no waiting room filled with patients putting pressure on providers because Marathon Health contracts with its employer clients to ensure that there is sufficient staffing and they guarantee performance.

Since Marathon Health started working with the City of Rockford, the City has saved millions. Even more importantly, the health of the public servants has been improved with over 80% of employees engaged with the clinic. The impact was so personally significant to me that I joined Marathon Health after leaving office in 2017.

It’s an honor to work for a healthcare organization where every patient is a VIP. I am blessed to have the opportunity to support this model of care with other government leaders across the nation.

To learn more about how Marathon Health can partner with your organization, get in touch today!