Katie Kirkland – Director of Benefits: My name is Katie Kirkland and I am the Director of Benefits for Southern Company.
I really like the culture that we have at Southern Company. I like our focus on our employees and how we really try to make sure that we are providing high-value benefits for employees.
We have around 30,000 employees that are enrolled in our medical plans and are eligible to use Healthcare Bluebook, so being able to offer technology solutions like Healthcare Bluebook is really important to us.
Our people that work in the field, either in trucks or in plants, they use their phones a lot, they don’t necessarily spend all day on email, and so having an option that they can access right in front of them wherever they’re at is important.
One of the things I was most impressed with, with Healthcare Bluebook, is their focus on real analytics.
We’ve been tracking our return on investment from the beginning, looking at who’s using the service, who’s going to green providers, who’s going to red providers and who’s shifting to green providers.
We’ve found with Healthcare Bluebook a consistent savings year over year, almost a million dollars a year for the entire time we’ve been with Healthcare Bluebook, which is at least a 2:0 ROI.
We obviously use price transparency with Healthcare Bluebook, and it is so easy for folks to understand. But quality was really important to us. It’s part of the reason why we selected Healthcare Bluebook.
Looking at the data behind the scenes to make sure that it is meaningful quality, that they are providing the best care possible in an evidence-based way.
We want people to have high value healthcare and not just low-price healthcare, so we spent some time really researching transparency solutions before we partnered with Healthcare Bluebook.
It is a great, very flexible, solution that has brought a lot of value to our company, that we’re proud to support, and we’re proud to give to our employees as a resource that they can use to help manage their own healthcare costs, get good quality providers, quality facilities, and use as a tool in their quiver of arrows to really manage their physical well-being.