EXCLUSIVE: Cisco has cut its healthcare costs by 8.5% since adding open-referral to its healthcare trust.
The network equipment giant has offered its 2,800 employees a healthcare trust, provided by Bupa, for the past eight years.
It introduced open-referral in April 2012 to help manage costs.
The initiative is designed to help employees find the right consultant for their healthcare needs, ensuring access to treatment and care, with staff usually being given a choice of two or three consultants.
Caroline Griffiths, head of HR at Cisco UK and Ireland, said: “Initiatives such as open referral have played a huge part in helping Cisco to manage its costs, as well as ensuring our employees get access to the very best healthcare.
“Healthcare is a very valuable benefit for our employees, both in terms of employee engagement and keeping our people well.
“We are very satisfied with open referral, which is used by the vast majority of our employees to find the right consultant for their condition.
“It ensures that our employees get a choice of high-quality consultants that are right for them and, as a business, it helps us to control our costs.”
As a user of this policy, we have been very unhappy with the access we have had to healthcare professionals. Our very recent experience with three different issues have all led to the same problems – The doctors we are advised to see are either not plan approved, or not fee assured or in the case of needing a second opinion, were less qualified than the original consultant we needed to see.
I have challenged BUPA on this extensively and they then informed me that they use a key word look up and the consultants only become plan approved if they submit reports and regular updates on their cases. Personally I would prefer doctors who are busy with their patients to those who have time to fill in reams of paperwork!!!
We have also had the issue that we have not been allowed to pay the difference between those who are plan approved and those who are not and we were not been able to see a doctor who could do the whole job, so potentially are faced with two separate operations (under general anesthetic) to get one job done fully.
In general, we have not been happy with this plan. How much of it is due to open referral and how much of it is down to other reasons, I don’t know, but it does not feel patient focussed!
Hello, we are really concerned to hear this. Your experience sounds very unusual and this is not how Open Referral works at all. We really want to investigate this and sort things out for you. Please could you give us a call on 08456 090111. Thank you
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