By Aimee O’Brien
How to Navigate Through the Hype
Are you responsible for purchasing health care benefits for your company? If you are, you know how complex and numerous the options are. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of companies in the marketplace – all making claims about the value and cost-savings they can bring to your company.
The trouble is, you’re often trying to compare apples to oranges. And sometimes it’s hard to even tell which claims are true. Some vendors are trustworthy and high-quality, but sadly, others present claims that are confusing or misleading – an arrangement that favors vendors’ interests at the purchaser’s expense.
You’re expected to deliver benefits that lower medical costs, increase productivity, and result in better outcomes – and you’re already starting at a major disadvantage.
At Validation Institute, we recognized this was a pain point – for employers, the people responsible for making the health care purchasing decisions, the employees, and even the vendors who simply wanted the opportunity to present the value they could offer.
In 2013, Sean Slovenski, CEO of Intel-GE Care Innovations, and industry guru Al Lewis, formed Validation Institute to bring truth and clarity to the health care benefits industry. The idea was to provide unbiased validation for qualified companies and certify individuals who could prove themselves capable of analyzing outcomes. (Read more about how Validation Institute started and continues to disrupt the health care benefits industry.)
Today, Validation Institute has evolved into the only unbiased source of information for health care benefits purchasers to identify and compare independently verified outcome measurements for specific, individual healthcare programs and services.
A Seal of Approval You Can Trust
Every day, vendors are bombarding buyers with competing marketing messages, promises of ROI, even awards and accolades that they’ve won. That’s where Validation Institute comes in.
As Jayne Schmitz, Wellness Program Specialist at Massachusetts Interlocal Insurance Association, says, “With so many vendors offering wellness solutions, it’s difficult to know which ones will actually show results and save us money. It is also very time-consuming to do the research. Validation Institute helped streamline this process so that we were able to choose vendors that truly make a difference.”
Validation Institute’s team of health population scientists and biostatisticians evaluate the performance of health care vendors, taking the burden off you to sort through the hype and instead letting independent experts determine which claims are accurate. Only vendors that make the cut are publicly accessible on our website.
No company can buy their way on to the list or be awarded validation through advertising or sponsorships. Every single one must undergo a rigorous process that systematically reviews analytics of the vendor’s claims to see if they actually deliver the results they promise, applying the strictest standards for measuring health outcomes. Only then do they get the Validation Institute seal of approval.
What to Look for When Evaluating Health Care Benefits Vendors
So how do you know which vendors you can trust? There are four types of validation:
- Calculator (allows you to change certain assumptions)
- Program Impact – Savings
- Program Impact – Outcomes
- Program Impact – Metrics
In simple terms, this means the data presented by the company has undergone Validation Institute’s strict standards of measure, and has been shown to produce the impact claimed in the given area.
When you see a company on our list of Validated Programs, you know their performance reports are correct and accurate. Plus, each company on the list has a free downloadable report that makes it easy to see and compare:
- The vendor’s claim (question/intervention goal/objectives)
- How it was measured (method/calculation)
- The result (findings/metric/outcome/savings)
It also includes any limitations of the data, or extenuating factors, that you should consider when evaluating vendors.
Why Health Care Benefits Vendors Work with Validation Institute
Employers who turn to Validation Institute when researching vendors save time and money identifying health care benefits vendors that will deliver the cost-savings and better outcomes for their employees.
But what’s in it for the vendors? Because Validation Institute is recognized as the only independent, unbiased organization dedicated to bringing transparency to heath care purchasing, companies that achieve Validation Institute’s seal of approval gain a tremendous competitive advantage.
Happy Whole Human Institute of Holistic Wellness is one of our validated companies. CEO Lisa Leit put it this way: “Validation Institute helped us choose a measure of how our program impacts people, one that was easy to administer and was valuable to employers, our target market. It has helped us attract more business, and to monitor our program’s success in improving people’s health status.”
Simply put, Validation Institute connects vendors who can prove they deliver value and savings with the people they want to meet: savvy, buyers who are interested in making informed, data-driven purchasing decisions.
Searching for vendors? Visit our list of Validated Programs or visit eXchange, our searchable online vendor directory.
Interested in having your health care company undergo validation? Click here to learn more or contact us.
Aimee O’Brien is the Chief Marketing Officer for Validation Institute.
