To rein in health care costs, corporate, government, and insurance professionals have been exploring ways to identify top performing providers, band together for group discounts, and educate health care consumers about the choices they make both in the lifestyle and medical treatment arenas.

This year, 20 enterprise level corporations intend to work together to dig deeply into those realms to determine whether they can crack the tough nut of controlling health care costs.

The Health Transformation Alliance includes such power players as Weyerhaeuser, Shell Oil, Pitney Bowes, Ingersoll Rand, The Hartford, Coca-Cola, and DuPont. The areas they have pinpointed for their special attention aren’t new. But to date, results in each area have not unleashed the potential that experts believe exist within them.

HTA’s founders decided that by examining health data from their combined 4 million covered employees, answers will begin to emerge.

“The initiative focuses on reducing the redundancies and waste in the supply chain that drive up the cost of health care coverage. By coming together to share expertise, the companies seek to make the current multilayered supply chain more efficient,” the group says. “The Alliance will serve as part of each company’s health strategy, bringing increased innovation, better analyses of the latest data, and greater leverage into how corporations obtain coverage for their workers.”

While the HTA is still in the formative stage, its members already know where they’re going to seek the highest returns on their efforts.

Marketplace efficiencies: Members will pool their substantial resources “to gain leverage and create an organization whose sole focus will be to ensure the health care needs of employees are being met more effectively and efficiently.”

Data mining: After stripping away individual identities form their collective data, the Alliance with crunch it six ways from Sunday to see what’s buried there. One major goal: Culling out the top providers, then steering employees their way. And, of course, asking for a group discount for doing so.

Consumer education: HTA wants to take the wellness model a step further and truly educate employees about the choices they make when facing a medical decision.

New purchasing and contracting efficiencies: Perhaps the trickiest waters to navigate, this area requires examining why doctors, patients, and companies make certain purchasing decisions for their health plans. The initial target appears to be pharmaceutical purchases — no big surprise, since that’s the latest runaway cost component of the system. “The Alliance will seek to change costly and inefficient purchasing and contracting systems that don’t deliver better health care results, but do drive up health care costs,” it says.

Whether these major healthcare insurance players can achieve results that have eluded other similar groups before them remains to be seen. But, say its founding members, their collective clout and the data they host gives the Alliance hope for a new cost-controlling day not to far off. And if they don’t find any answers, the next step could be out the exit door from health insurance for employees.

“The current system is unsustainable and it costs our employees too much,” Kevin Cox, the chief human resources officer (CHRO) of American Express, told CompensationBLR.com. “Even the most successful companies won’t be able to afford the rising costs of health care in the not too distant future.”

 

Complete your profile to continue reading and get FREE access to BenefitsPRO, part of your ALM digital membership.

Your access to unlimited BenefitsPRO content isn’t changing.
Once you are an ALM digital member, you’ll receive:

  • Breaking benefits news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
  • Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
  • Critical converage of the property casualty insurance and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, PropertyCasualty360 and ThinkAdvisor
NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.

Dan Cook

Dan Cook is a journalist and communications consultant based in Portland, OR. During his journalism career he has been a reporter and editor for a variety of media companies, including American Lawyer Media, BusinessWeek, Newhouse Newspapers, Knight-Ridder, Time Inc., and Reuters. He specializes in health care and insurance related coverage for BenefitsPRO.