Safeway – Successfully Influencing Health Consumer Behavior

By Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

We’ve had an active discussion going about how to motivate consumers to make good decisions about their health when managing their health or chronic disease. So when I heard that Safeway has managed to freeze the growth of their healthcare spending over the past four years through the implementation of a corporate wellness program, I couldn’t wait to see how they accomplished this.

Safeway is a large retail grocery chain with roughly 200,000 employees. They are self insured, spending approximately $1 billion per year on healthcare.

As a self insured employer, Safeway had the flexibility to design their own benefits plan and they did so following a set of understandings (I’ll post more specifics from the presentation by Steven Burd, Chairman and CEO of Safeway, at the World Health Care Congress. if I’m able to get his slides).

The Difference Between Vision and Strategy in Healthcare Reform

By Ben Dillon, Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

In our business, the greatest risks and opportunities that we experience are due to the major changes in the industry we serve: healthcare. It’s with this in mind that I’m attending the World Health Care Congress in Washington, D.C. this week.

Personally, I’ve been surprised at how aggressively the Obama administration has proceeded with a dialogue on healthcare reform. I truly believed this topic was too politically charged to deal with so early in the term. Clearly I was wrong.

The opening panel this morning examined the issue of achieving universal health coverage from three perspectives: the new administration, the California experiment that has failed to pass and the Massachusetts framework that is now providing coverage for nearly 98 percent of its residents.