Wednesday, February 24, 2009

WellNet Supports HPM Institute Director in Calling for More Active Enterprise Involvement in Managing Healthcare Quality and Costs

Bethesda, MD —February 17, 2009 — As one of the founding members of the Healthcare Performance Management (HPM) Institute, WellNet today expressed its support for — and agreement with — an op-ed piece published in the Orange County Register by George Pantos. Pantos, the Executive Director of the HPM Institute, described the positive role that healthcare performance management strategies can play in controlling skyrocketing healthcare insurance costs for employers, while improving the quality of service to employees.

In his op-ed. piece, Pantos pointed out:

"Businesses generally lack the data necessary to measure and manage their health costs, even though health care often represents their second- or third-biggest expense. Indeed, executives have a better sense of how much money they spend on office supplies than they do of where their health-plan dollars are going. But with the cost of health benefits projected to increase 7 percent in 2010 — and to double over the next seven years — businesses can no longer afford such willful ignorance."

"At WellNet, we could not agree more strongly with this sentiment," said Keith Lemer, president of Bethesda-based WellNet Healthcare. "WellNet has been dedicated to working with employers to bring healthcare costs into a management paradigm that will reduce risk to employers while improving healthcare outcomes for employees. This cannot be done without access to good data and without effective management systems to interpret and act on the insights that come from this data," he said.

As a founding member of the HPM Institute, WellNet fully intends to participate in efforts that highlight new ways to develop better business models for managing employee healthcare benefits.

About WellNet Healthcare

WellNet Healthcare enables companies and their executive management team to measure and manage their healthcare costs by finding and fixing problems using real-time healthcare information to make better business decisions that lower healthcare costs. For more information, visit their Web site at www.WellNet.com.