Ep #98: Best Employee Benefits Practices - With Russ Blakely

At the recent Ascend! conference in Nashville, we caught up with Russ Blakely, President of Russ Blakely & Associates. In the course of our conversation, it became apparent that Russ is doing a lot of the things “the right way,” and we decided to invite him to the program to talk about best practices. Russ is a great example of the things he’s doing in the benefits arena that you can likely learn from and implement in your own practice.In this wide-ranging discussion, we cover how taking ownership of client problems may lead you to saving money, and when it makes sense to implement onsite clinics and pharmacies and how that may impact the pharma and medical spend. We also talk about how Russ has created a proprietary physician network and what it did for their firm, as well as how they discover “at-risk” employees and what conditions they find most prevalent within a given population.What You’ll Learn From this Episode:What to do when expensive care happens outside a clinic.Why it is important to leverage data and do directed mining.Whether the onsite clinics in the public sector are unusual.What prompted the initial physician recruitment and how that grew into a network.What a “network within a network” is and why it is important.