How to Gather Buy-In for Your Onsite Clinic
Opening an onsite clinic offers a wealth of benefits to your employees and your business, including increased productivity, better morale and lower healthcare costs. But it’s also a major financial and logistical undertaking for many companies.
For an onsite clinic to succeed, you need to collect the backing of all important stakeholders in your business — senior leadership, board members and even employees. This requires taking time to understand your motivations for opening an onsite clinic, show the benefits of this move and clearly communicate the value of an onsite clinic for your business.
Presenting the Value of an Onsite Clinic
Your main task when gathering buy-in for your onsite clinic is laying out the benefits of having an employee health clinic. The stronger claims you can make to stakeholders, the more likely you are to succeed in their partnership and support moving forward.
Here are three areas to focus your attention on when presenting the value of having an onsite clinic.
Cost Efficiency and Return on Investment
Providing healthcare for your employees is expensive, and costs are expected to rise. When you add in costs associated with offsite care for work-related injuries — unnecessary treatments, workers’ compensation claims and recordables — it adds up quickly.
One major driver of needlessly expensive offsite care for on-the-job injuries is unnecessary testing, treatments and prescriptions. When there is no one providing oversight to the care your employee receives for their injuries, it’s easy for them to be given a level of care inappropriate for their injuries, such as a costly emergency room visit for a minor burn.
By managing work-related injuries at an onsite clinic, your employees still get exceptional care for their work-related illnesses and injuries, but your costs are predictable and manageable. You pay for the clinic and all the services it provides, and the clinic doesn’t make extra by recommending unnecessary treatments.
Additionally, by managing many workplace injuries from your onsite clinic, you won’t trigger costly claims or recordables, things that are often required when workers are sent for offsite care.
Showing stakeholders the upfront cost for the onsite clinic, as well as its year-over-year operational costs, then comparing those numbers to your current spend for offsite care, workers’ compensation claims and recordables makes it clear how much return they can expect on their investment.
Employee Wellness and Productivity
When your employees aren’t feeling well or they don’t feel their off-time goals aren’t supported, they’re more likely to miss work. In some cases, this could lead to workers leaving their jobs and requiring you to go back to the drawing board and find a replacement.
This drives down your overall productivity and drives up rates of worker burnout, costs related to absenteeism and costs of continued recruitment and hiring. Over time, a workforce of sick, unproductive employees could tarnish your business reputation and reduce your profits.
By offering an onsite clinic, employees can receive prompt care for health concerns before they become major issues without taking time away from work. They can even be screened for chronic conditions — such as high blood pressure — that may impact their ability to work and be productive. Easy access to friendly, helpful onsite clinic team members may even make your workers feel more comfortable with seeking out medical help, getting them the care they need faster.
Your onsite clinic also can offer wellness services, such as lifestyle assessments and one-on-one health coaching. These services help your workers take charge of improving their health and wellness.
When your workers receive the medical care they need to stay healthy, they are more productive in their work days and they take fewer sick days. This leads to increased productivity as a team and can help you exceed your workplace goals.
Competitive Advantage and Talent Retention
Finding top talent can be a struggle in a tight labor market, and it can be even more difficult to retain the employees who are already doing great work for you. With companies trying to entice workers with promises of unlimited PTO, bonus pay and other benefits, it can be difficult to compete for the employees you need to help your business succeed.
Rather than installing a foosball table in your break room or organizing fitness classes after hours, giving your workers access to a convenient onsite clinic can give you an edge over the competition, assisting in your efforts to recruit and retain skilled workers.
Employees who have the added benefit of an onsite clinic that supports their health and wellness goals are more likely to feel supported and valued by you as an employer, and they are more likely to choose to work for you long term.
Strategies for Gathering Buy-In for Your Onsite Clinic
Because you’re planning to make a big expenditure to set up and run an onsite clinic, it’s essential you carefully communicate the benefits of such a move. Here’s how.
Conduct Comprehensive Research and Data Analysis
It will be difficult to prove the need for an onsite clinic without data to back up your claims of cost savings and return on investment.
To begin with, you’ll need to look at historical data related to:
- Employee injury rates
- Employee healthcare costs (for work-related injuries and illnesses)
- Workers’ compensation claim costs
- Recordable rates and costs
- Employee absenteeism rates
- Employee turnover
- Recruitment and hiring costs
All this information will help you put together a picture of how much you’re spending now and may help you determine how much you could save with an onsite clinic.
Surveying your employees is another key component of this process. Conduct an employee health survey, asking questions related to how often they feel comfortable taking time off work to visit a doctor for routine health concerns, whether they would be more likely to visit a doctor if it was more convenient, how often they feel ill and other key questions. This will help you build a case for an onsite clinic as the solution to meeting the needs of your employees.
If necessary, a needs assessment can be conducted to identify any specific healthcare needs or gaps within your organization. This may identify something that will provide a strong case for your onsite clinic, making it easier to get approved.
Develop a Strong Proposal
Now that you’ve got all your data and information, you need to put it in a formal proposal that clearly lays out all the ways your organization will benefit from an onsite clinic.
Organizing your proposal into sections by benefit (financial, health outcomes and employee satisfaction rates, for example) allows you to communicate the value an onsite clinic will provide. Using charts, graphs and other illustrative elements that make the key data easy to read and understand.
If you don’t have the time or know where to start, onsite clinic partners can help you identify and synthesize the necessary data. A clear, effective proposal will take several hours’ worth of work, and spending a little bit of money to make your proposal more effective and persuasive likely will pay off in the long run.
Engage Stakeholders Through Communication and Collaboration
Collecting the data and putting together a proposal shouldn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s essential to get input and feedback from key stakeholders throughout the whole process, especially if you’re wanting to make a clear business case for an onsite clinic.
Loop all key parties in early in the process, soliciting their ideas for data that would be helpful to see and results they would like to see from an onsite clinic. When necessary, engage these stakeholders in collecting and analyzing data, and ask what elements they feel would be most helpful to see addressed in the formal proposal.
The earlier and more frequently you communicate with stakeholders, the more likely you are to have their support when it comes time to decide on an onsite clinic.
Your Partner for a Successful Onsite Clinic
With years of experience, Medcor helps businesses realize the value and ROI of onsite clinics to keep employees healthy and happy while also cutting their healthcare costs. Medcor’s onsite clinics can be configured to meet nearly any organization’s needs, including permanent onsite clinics and mobile treatment centers. Ready to explore how an onsite clinic can benefit your business? Speak to an advocate today.