Employer Q & A

Q: What is Dossia?

A: The Dossia Founders Group is a consortium of large employers united in their mission to empower employees, their families, and others in their communities to take control of their health and healthcare by providing them with an independent, lifelong, personal, private and portable health record. The Founders' vision is to transform U.S. healthcare by reducing waste, lowering costs, and facilitating better quality care.

Q: What is the Dossia Personal Health Platform?

A: The Dossia Personal Health Record Platform is a web-based infrastructure used to gather, store and securely manage each employee's personal, private and lifelong health information. The Dossia Personal Health Record does three things:

  1. Aggregates an individual's electronic health information from multiple sources - health and medical information from insurance claims, laboratories, pharmacies, hospitals, and physicians along with personal health information from health devices such as weight scales, glucometers, and pedometers.
  2. Places health information under the user's control every individual can decide what information is to be shared and with whom. No other parities have access to the user's health information without the users express consent.
  3. Provides a plethora of health applications, tools and services that enable individuals to take charge of their health and become more informed and demanding consumers of the healthcare system.

Q: Why should I provide a Dossia Personal Health Record to my employees?

A: On average, employers are faced with 10% annual growth in healthcare spending. If this pattern persists, healthcare spending will be twice what it is today in only seven years. This trend is unsustainable, and should be unacceptable to employers. The time for passivity is over. Dossia is a solution that empowers your employees to improve health and healthcare. Dossia will reduce your healthcare cost growth by improving employee health, lowering employee healthcare utilization, and improving the efficiency of healthcare delivered to employees. Dossia provides your employees with the personal health information that they and their doctors need to make informed health decisions, and further provides a platform from which to cost-effectively launch numerous employee wellness and benefits programs.

Q: What is the benefit of a Dossia Personal Health Record to my employees?

A: The Dossia Personal Health Record provides your employees with access to, and puts them in control of, their personal health information, and further provides them with personal health tools that are individually tailored to enable them to better manage their health and health care.

Employees benefit in many ways:

  1. Empowered healthcare consumer having a PHR allows employees to share vital information with their doctors, to check for the accuracy of their information, and to flag any potential errors that may arise. With a Dossia Personal Health Record your employees are more informed and empowered consumers.
  2. Improved Health monitoring health habits such as diet and exercise and tracking health metrics such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol can significantly improve well being and reduce risk of health issues down the road.
  3. Lower out of pocket expenses if your employees are undergoing treatment for a chronic condition or just dealing with a seasonal illness, getting good information and good feedback can reduce their expenses by avoiding unnecessary doctor visits or duplicative tests and by making sure they get the right medications and adhere to the right course of care.

Q: What is the value proposition (ROI) for investing in Dossia?

A: Equipped with a Dossia Personal Health Record and the personalized health tools that come with it, your employees become more active participants in their health and healthcare. This leads to improved health outcomes, more efficient care, reduced healthcare costs, reduced absenteeism, and increased employee productivity, morale, and retention. A corporate culture of health and wellness benefits employees and employers alike.

Q: What is the difference between Dossia's Personal Health Platform and other PHRs currently available on the market?

A: Dossia differs from other PHR vendors in several very important ways:

  1. Dossia provides an un-tethered PHR that draws from multiple data sources and allows you to keep your PHR even if you change your health plan, doctor, or employer.
  2. Dossia directly represents the interests of large employers and their employees, who have a genuine shared motive to improve employee health and lower healthcare costs, and are uniquely positioned to leverage health data from multiple sources.
  3. The Dossia Personal Health Record can be used as a flexible platform from which to launch a myriad of employee health benefits programs.
  4. Dossia is completely independent of any funding from on-line advertizing or internet searches. Your data is completely private. The purpose of Dossia is lower healthcare demand and to improve the efficiency of healthcare delivered.
  5. Dossia Personal Health Records, complete with professionally sourced data, are available to the dependent family members of employees.

Q: Why should I pay for Dossia when my employees can access other PHRs for free?

A: There are several key reasons to choose Dossia:

  1. Dossia provides a superior solution for employees and employers we ensure that every employee's PHR is populated with professionally sourced health data, something that no other vendor, including Microsoft and Google, can guarantee.
  2. Dossia's more sophisticated verification process provides 'single click' access to data, unlike Microsoft and Google, that require you to verify your identity each time you access a new data source.
  3. Dossia represents a consortium of employers our incentives are transparent: enabling employees to make good health decisions in order to improve their health and save money. Our goal is to improve healthcare efficiency and reduce rising costs. We have no interest in monetizing our platform for search, advertising, or data mining revenue.

Q: Why should I pay for Dossia when my employees can access a free PHR through their health plan administrator?

A: There are several key reasons to choose Dossia.

  1. A Dossia Personal Health Record is untethered and portable it is your employee's record for life. Dossia is perceived by employees as a genuine 'benefit', rather than a health plan's attempt to retain customers.
  2. Dossia aggregates personal health information for your employees from multiple data sources including insurance, pharmacy, dental, and provider records.
  3. Dossia enables a robust ecosystem of personalized health tools that enable your employees to take action to improve their health and care.
  4. Dossia's goal is to improve employee health and lower employer healthcare costs our financial incentives and yours are directly aligned. Our PHR is not purposed to retain health plan customers or increase claims processing revenues.
  5. As a separate, third party entity, Dossia retains sufficient autonomy such that employees are comfortable trusting Dossia as a secure and completely private repository for their personal health information. On the other hand, employees are often reluctant to share their health information with insurers, employers, and even providers.

Q: What do you mean by 'employer leverage' to acquire health data?

A: As large self-insured employers, the Dossia Founders are uniquely positioned to make requests from data providers (such as insurance administrators, labs, pharmacies, and even provider networks) to export their employees' health data into their Dossia Personal Health Record. Employers pay the bills and are the real customer of the healthcare system.

Q: Don't employees have a right to their own data anyway?

A: Technically, yes they do, but often insurers, providers, labs, and pharmacies are very reluctant to give up your data. HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) says that patients can request a copy of their data and ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act aka the Stimulus Bill) further says that companies that have a person's health information in electronic form must provide a copy electronically to a destination of the individual's choice. Dossia is using both of these laws as well as aforementioned employer leverage as enablers of its approach.

Q: What is the difference between a Dossia Founder and a Dossia Customer? Is there still space for additional Founders?

A: The Dossia Charter stipulates 13 Founding Consortium Members, who each contribute $1.5M in order to secure their position. Dossia also accepts customers who wish to purchase Dossia's product without becoming a Founder. Both Founders and customers alike pay Dossia for an annual subscription but non-Founders will not enjoy the same pricing as Founders.

Q: I already invest heavily in employee health promotion and have lower healthcare costs than my competitors, what added value does Dossia deliver?

A: Dossia is not in competition with other employee health promotion initiatives, but rather will enable those initiatives to be delivered more cost effectively, thereby augmenting your overall ROI from employee health promotion. Dossia will serve as the launchpad from which to deliver a comprehensive employee benefits program.

Q: Why is it my responsibility to encourage my employees to be healthy? What is in it for me?

A: Healthy employees incur as much as 40% lower healthcare costs than their less healthy counterparts, are absent less, and are more productive at the workplace. A corporate culture of health and wellness can further enhance morale, recruitment, and retention. The ROI on employee health promotion initiatives is consistently over 3:1.

Q: If the Stimulus Bill (ARRA/HITECH Act) will pay for nation-wide adoption of EHRs, why should I then invest in PHRs for my employees?

A: An EHR is a health IT tool for doctors and hospitals, whereas a PHR is a health IT tool for individuals, consumers, and patients. Though EHR systems can sometimes offer 'patient portals' that allow patients to view their health information, patient portals are limited to a single data source, typically do not allow patients to annotate or contribute to their record, and provide no or few personalized health tools.

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