Publications

Recent NBCH Publications

Tailoring Health Care Benefits to Your Employees In today’s challenging fiscal environment, firms that sponsor health care benefits are looking for benefit solutions to help them do more with less. Such solutions might involve closer scrutiny of health plan data or the creation of new partnerships with coalitions, brokers, plan managers, and employees. Large and small employers alike use strategies like these. This report on employer forays into “Total Health Benefit Management” and their successes suggests ways in which your company can tackle the challenge of rising health care costs and improve employee health in the process.
Aligning Incentives & Systems: Promoting Synergy Between Value-Based Insurance Design and the Patient Centered Medical Home The Patient Centered Primary Care Collaborative, in collaboration with NBCH, this week released "Aligning Incentives and Systems" which presents the mechanics of both strategies and reviews the evidence for their clinical and economic value. The business value case for employers and steps employers can take to implement this synergistic strategy are included. Ten case studies--from employers, health plans, state governments and a municipality--explore how combining VBID and PCMH can enhance quality of care while lowering costs."
2009 Health Plan Diabetes Care Performance In the past decade diabetes has emerged as a crucial health care cost driver for many employers, one that hand in hand with obesity is on the rise. Employers are increasingly seeing that it is a bottom line issue to prevent diabetes, identify it early, and treat it “to goal” in their employee population. This imperative must be carried out in partnership with health plans and other health vendors to control the personal and financial costs of diabetes exacerbations and complications. In this third Annual eValue8 Employer Report we examine data from leading health plans that report to business coalitions on their health management activity.
eValue8 2009: Measuring Progress Toward Value-Based Purchasing eValue8, the nation's leading, evidence-based request for information (RFI) tool, is widely used by business health coalitions, their purchaser members, and national employers to assess and manage the quality of their health care vendors. This year’s report contains a specific emphasis on how well health plans are delivering value-based care, meaning the ability to deliver quality care efficiently. The summary will draw from three of the topics covered in eValue8: payment reform (provider incentives), plan design (consumer incentives), and coordination of care. Regardless of the outcome of the health reform debate, these issues will endure as areas in need of attention and improvement.
Health Plan Capabilities to Support Value Based Benefit Design Recognizing the importance of consumer decision-making on health care costs, employers are trying innovative programs to engage their enrollees in making healthy lifestyle and medical care decisions. One such strategy is called Value Based Benefits Design or VBBD, which builds specific consumer incentives into plan design benefits or premium contribution structure to steer consumers to make high value decisions. NBCH’s eValue8 RFI collects information on a range of health plan initiatives and includes questions that address specific health plan capabilities required to support a VBBD program. The information in this Guide is based on the 99 validated health plan responses and indicates that many plans have the capability to effectively support VBBD.
NBCH Releases eValue8 Employer Report: Health Plan Tobacco Cessation Performance Employers have a critical role in promoting tobacco cessation. Subsequently, employers should offer and plans should administer benefits that are most likely to achieve smoking cessation results. The following report describes purchaser expectations for health plan performance with respect to tobacco cessation and key results from eValue8, the nation’s leading RFI tool assessing health plan performance on behalf of employers.
NBCH Releases Diabetes Seed Grant Final Report In January, 2008 NBCH announced award of grants to 14 member coalitions to implement “Diabetes Seed Grants." Each coalition developed a program to improve the quality of diabetes care and prevention at the community level, and evaluated the impact of the program. NBCH provided technical assistance to support coalition implementation activities, and conducted an evaluation of the community activities overall. NBCH member coalitions wrapped up their programs in the spring of 2009, and the final report is now available!

For a detailed list of categorized NBCH publications, please visit the NBCH Publication Library.  NBCH often prints a small quanitity of its publications as well.  Members may request available publications by contacting Alyssa Ketterer, Program Manager, (202) 775-9300 x25