Dive Brief:
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The new Health Transformation Alliance (HTA), comprised of 20 U.S. employers providing health benefits for a combined four million employees and family members, announced their joint goal last week of improving health outcomes while reducing the more than $14 billion they're currently spending on care.
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The group says its strategy involves supply chain reforms to reduce redundancies and waste through shared expertise.
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Most notably, HTA plans to pool and utilize aggregated and unidentified employee health data.
Dive Insight:
While the concept brings the possibility of leveraging major new knowlege to help employers make better business decisions, it also raises ethics questions from those concerned with privacy and the potential implications.
Even if employee data is only utilized anonymously and in aggregate form, some question what it could mean for workers to be associated, possibly publicly, with their company's average BMI, anti-depressant use, etc., notes Forbes, adding it could leave employers that are opposed or that lack the resources to follow suit at a disadvantage.
Questions have already been raised about the privacy and security of employee health data utilized in corporate wellness programs, as well as the increasing difficulty some employees face in attempting to opt out. In addition, new research throws a wrench into the utilization of BMI as a measure for health, predicting health costs and determining what to charge individual employees for their care.