Make your behavioral health benefits work for you.

How do you validate a hunch? In this case study, we’ll take a look at how one employer used the Artemis Platform to take action on behavioral health.

The customer's benefits team suspected they needed to improve their behavioral health programs:

• They were hearing from employees that their jobs were high stress. The National Business Group on Health reports that 54% of U.S. employees experience high stress.
• Consultants and industry data shows that there is a shortage of mental health providers across America and access to care is a growing issue in the U.S.
• They noted high utilization of the Employee Assistance Program.

The challenge.

These anecdotal reports put them on the right track, but they needed solid evidence to justify rolling out new behavioral health programs. That’s when the Artemis Health team went to work. Using real employer data from multiple vendors, Artemis built custom reports and visualizations that showed how behavioral health was impacting employees.

“Employee feedback got to the need, but the Artemis team helped us build the business case. We were able to look at our own data and see in our population that these conditions are having an impact on overall cost as well as the impact on the individuals.”
—Senior Benefit Program Manager

The solution.

The Artemis Platform integrates data from multiple feeds and enables easy comparison across a number of variables with clear visualizations. This is unique in the industry. In this case, the benefits team was able to compare distinctive member groups against a number of data points to make their case for improving their behavioral health program offerings.

Tip: It’s a best practice in data analysis to verify findings using multiple data sets from different sources. This helps you confirm that you’re looking not just at an anomalous trend or an outlier, but a consistent pattern. The patterns uncovered may not have surfaced in data from just one source.

01   Artemis compared data from multiple vendors. We “cross-walked” the data to look at absenteeism, PEPM spending on medical and Rx claims, disability work days absent, ER visits and comorbid conditions like musculoskeletal diagnoses.

02  Artemis set up Cohorts. We looked at four groups of employees using the Cohorts App in Artemis: those with depression, those with anxiety, and two groups outside the Cohort.

03   Artemis made visualizations easy. The custom visualizations provided a clear comparison of the Cohorts and comorbid conditions. Visualizations enabled the benefits team to share findings with stakeholders.

The results.

The findings clearly validated the customer’s hunch: PEPM medical and Rx costs for all conditions with a comorbid diagnosis of anxiety or depression was a big cost driver for their organization. Plus, the data showed a correlation between these diagnoses and absenteeism. Armed with this information, the benefits team will roll out several new behavioral health wellness programs for its employees. They’re taking a proactive approach on behavioral health to improve employee wellness and address their benefits spend.

“We’ll measure success by looking at how many people are enrolling [in new behavioral health wellness programs], continuous employee engagement, and the impact on health. We’ll use Artemis to track the same cohorts and cost of claims.” —Senior Benefit Program Manager