By January Wetzel
reprinted with permission from the Jackson County Tribune
Rising health care costs have led Seymour Community Schools Corp. to partner with a health care vendor to develop a local wellness clinic for teachers and other school employees as well as their families.
The board of school trustees has approved a recommendation from the district’s insurance committee to hire Activate Healthcare LLC to operate the voluntary clinic that could serve as many as 900 people that are on the corporation’s medical plan.
Business manager Nancy Lumley said the committee has looked at many different options to save money and that contracting with an independent vendor will provide benefits to both employees and the school system.
“A lot of employers are starting clinics and are finding significant savings,” Lumley told trustees.
Plans are still in the beginning stages, but the clinic has the potential of saving the corporation at least $250,000 per year, Lumley said.
Employees will see savings right away, she added, because by utilizing the clinic, they will not have to pay co-pays for office visits, generic prescriptions and routine lab work.
The corporation has chosen a wellness model that will focus on preventive care as well as provide primary health care, chronic disease management and pharmaceutical services.
“We are dedicated to the wellness model for our employee clinic in order to provide the maximum benefit to both our employees and our plan,” Lumley said.
The clinic won’t provide any type of specialty care or radiography services, so those will continue to be supplied by local medical providers such as Schneck Medical Center.
“There will still be a need for the local medical community,” Superintendent Teran Armstrong said.
Lumley said there is some interest from other local employers in partnering with the school corporation to use the health clinic, thus sharing the expense of its operation.
Besides implementing the clinic, the board also has approved a plan to modify the school corporation’s health benefits. Those changes include increasing premiums by 6 percent and changing the employer/employee premium contributions, all in an effort to keep the corporation from having to join the state health plan, Lumley said.
“The state has mandated schools must join its plan if our corporation annual expenditures for health care are more than 12 percent above what we would have spent if we were in the state health plan,” she said.
Trustee Art Juergens, a member of the corporation’s insurance committee, said the clinic is a good idea.
“We’re going to have to find different things to do to reduce our rates,” he said.
Besides the Seymour clinic, employees also will have access to other Activate clinics in Bedford and Bloomington.
Greg Ransom with JA Benefits, the corporations’ insurance broker, said focusing on employee health care is important.
“Making your employees healthier is your best chance of controlling health care costs,” he told the school board.