With healthcare reform placing greater onus on employers to provide insurance to their workers, a growing number of companies are bringing health and wellness services right to the workplace. Among recent businesses to do so, car manufacturing giant Toyota has invested $150,000 in a new 1,200-square-foot clinic residing just outside its Buffalo manufacturing plant.
Toyota is not a newcomer to the onsite health trend. With the highest healthcare costs of all 14 production sites in North America, Buffalo executives worked for the past six months to duplicate the clinics Walgreens-run Take Care Health Systems already operates at Toyota facilities in Georgetown and Erlanger, Ky., and San Antonio, Texas.
The modern facility, which runs much like an urgent care clinic, is open to Toyota employees, family members and retirees, 73 percent of whom live within a 30-mile radius of the plant, Mike Lutz, the plant's general manager of administration, told the Charleston Daily Mail.
Toyota's Buffalo clinic is open nine hours a day, five days a week, with a physician onsite four hours a week and a full time registered nurse and nurse practitioner also on staff. A full-service pharmacy is right across the hall. Clinic visitors incur just a $5 copay and can fill generic prescriptions for free, with other in-network physician visits and higher-end prescriptions costing no more than $30. "Toyota is hoping for a long-term payback," Lutz said.
Employers much smaller than Toyota are also taking part in the health clinic trend. St. Louis-based JM Family Enterprises, with 500 employees, recently opened a similar facility in partnership with SSM DePaul Medical Center.
Some onsite health clinics have also gone the extra mile to obtain third-party accreditation, including two of Comprehensive Health Services, Inc.'s HybridHealth centers that recently received a seal of approval from the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care.
"We are extremely proud of not only meeting, but surpassing, compliance in all areas of AAAHC standards with an excellent rating," said CHS Director of Quality, Drew Di Giovanni, MPH, FACMPE. "This far exceeded our expectations and demonstrates to our customers and their employees that CHS health centers are of the utmost quality and should be the place employees look to for the best healthcare experience."
To learn more:
- read the Charleston Daily Mail article
- check out this St. Louis Globe-Democrat piece
- read this article from The Medical News