January 09, 2025

Exploring Innovation in Preventive Care

A fresh look at updated screening guidelines and evolving testing methods to assist employers in evaluating ways to improve their members’ screening compliance and reduce hidden cost barriers to accessing preventive care.

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Screening and prevention play an essential role in early detection of serious diseases and achieving overall long-term health outcomes. Access to preventive care varies greatly around the world due to differing health care systems and regulatory frameworks. What’s more, multinational employers must navigate these diverse public health care systems, cultural differences, regulatory landscapes and technological disparities to enhance and standardize preventive care access for employees regardless of their location in the world. Diverse markets and changing guidelines around the world require multinational employers to remain vigilant about preventive service coverage provisions within their health and well-being strategy and plan design. Moreover, in an effort to proactively manage rising health care costs, employers can deploy a globally consistent approach in their preventive care strategy. In fact, 49% of employers include preventive health in their global minimum benefit standards and that number is expected to grow.¹

Preventive screenings generally refer to procedures like colonoscopies, mammograms and other tests that detect health problems before symptoms develop. More broadly, preventive care includes all measures used to avoid disease such as screenings, vaccinations, annual checkups and wellness visits. Emerging innovative screening technologies and new data indicating earlier occurrence of certain cancers, like colorectal and breast cancers, coupled with higher incidence of late-stage diagnosis, are a call to action for employers to assess their coverage, programs and communications.^2,3 Their partners, including health plans, care navigators, global benefit brokers/consultants and primary care providers, also play an important role in promoting the use of preventive screenings and educating members about the importance of maintaining a healthy lifestyle and adhering to preventive care guidelines.

While consumers in the U.S. may be aware that their health insurance plans are required to cover 100% of the costs for preventive care, determining what qualifies as ”preventive care” is complex and can be confusing for employees. This often leads to misunderstandings about the preventive care cost-sharing rules and difficulties estimating out-of-pocket costs. Such confusion extends outside the U.S. as employers and health care consumers must navigate varying levels of coverage across different private and government-provided health systems. In many European countries (e.g., Germany) that have publicly funded health care systems, preventive health services are covered fully without cost-sharing and in those countries where preventive health care isn’t fully covered, establishing a preventive care strategy can help enable equitable access across multiple countries. Leveraging a captive outside the U.S. can be useful in driving a global preventive care strategy by forming frameworks around prevention and screening guidelines and ensuring coverage.4 Given estimates that there will be a 30% increase in early-onset cancer cases by 2030 coupled with the increasing incidence of cancer and preventable conditions among younger populations, employers are well-suited to develop a strategy to identify employees most at risk from missed screenings and then facilitating access to such services where possible.^5,6

As employers are thinking about how to design their plans to maximize member engagement in disease prevention, they need to decide what to include in the list of preventive screenings and cost sharing requirements, how the age-based screening eligibility criteria should be adjusted and how to implement patient support services and design communications that adhere to evidence-based preventive guidelines and empower members to access preventive services in a timely and cost-effective way.

More Topics

Resource Plan Design & Administration Preventive Services Primary Care