Health Delivery System Case Study
A large, integrated health delivery system in the Mid-Atlantic partnered with HealthNEXT to transform its culture of health, safety, and wellbeing, achieving substantial gains in both assessment scores and workforce outcomes.
A Mid-Atlantic Health System at an Inflection Point
As a rapidly growing health delivery system in the Mid‑Atlantic region, the organization faced challenges in better identifying individual health risks and developing actionable plans, addressing chronic and complex conditions, and strengthening marketing and communications to promote vitality and connect covered lives with available benefits. Leadership partnered with HealthNEXT to apply a proven, data‑driven methodology for building a stronger culture of health and wellbeing across the enterprise.
Using the Employer Health Opportunity Assessment as a Strategic Compass
HealthNEXT began the engagement with the Employer Health Opportunity Assessment (EHOA), a comprehensive, evidence-based assessment that measures an employer’s maturity in creating a culture of health, safety, and wellbeing. The EHOA evaluates ten best-practice pillars—from leadership support and strategic planning to workplace environment, incentives and benefit design, engagement, and vendor integration—and produces a score on a 1000‑point scale.
A benchmark score is 700, indicating high-performing organizations that are successfully embedding health and wellbeing into their culture; a perfect score of 1000 reflects exemplary performance and best-practice execution across all pillars. By establishing a clear baseline and a prioritized roadmap, the EHOA helped this health system see where it stood, where it needed to go, and which actions would create the greatest impact over time.
Scaling Programs Across the Population Health Continuum
Guided by EHOA findings and HealthNEXT’s research-based playbook, the health system implemented a series of programmatic enhancements across the population health continuum:
- Strengthening prevention and risk reduction
The organization expanded annual biometric screenings, improving how results were aggregated and trended over time, and conducted annual health risk appraisals that were integrated with biometric data to identify common health risks and target interventions more precisely.
- Supporting chronic and complex conditions
The health system launched its first comprehensive diabetes program through a point-solution vendor and created an internal program to support individuals with complex comorbidities and high-cost claims, ensuring that high-need employees received more coordinated, proactive support.
- Embedding wellbeing into the work environment
To normalize healthy behaviors, the organization introduced health fairs, incentive programs, stairwell-use campaigns, and a robust calendar of lunch-and-learn events and convened its first health and wellbeing vendor summit to better align partners and reduce fragmentation.
- Connecting employees to primary care
A focused campaign encouraged employees to establish a relationship with a trusted primary care provider and complete an annual wellness exam, reducing the number of “medically homeless” individuals and strengthening the foundation for ongoing prevention and early intervention.
From Baseline to Breakthrough: Measurable Score Improvement
Over a five-year collaboration, the health system improved its Employer Health Opportunity Assessment (EHOA) performance from roughly one-third to approximately two-thirds of benchmark, an 86% gain from its original baseline. During this period, the score rose from 364 to 460—a 26% increase across three assessments—and the organization showed meaningful improvement in all ten best-practice pillars, with several more than doubling their scores, demonstrating a broad shift in culture, governance, and execution rather than isolated program wins.
Turning Data Into Direction: The Illness Burden Placemat™
To guide its investments and measure impact, the health system worked with HealthNEXT to enhance its data and analytics capabilities. The organization improved tracking of participation in key programs, medical and pharmacy utilization, medical cost trends, and aggregate health risk and clinical outcomes.
A central innovation was the development of an Illness Burden Placemat™—a visual tool that consolidated prevalent risks, chronic conditions, and diagnoses driving high-cost claims. This gave leadership a clear view of the organization’s health burden and helped prioritize initiatives that would most effectively reduce risk, improve outcomes, and support workforce resilience.
Evidence of Impact
A stronger culture of health, safety, and wellbeing has been shown to correlate with lower medical cost trends, reduced absenteeism and presenteeism, higher engagement, and better overall performance. For a health delivery system, these gains directly support safer, more reliable patient care and stronger organizational resilience.
As this Mid-Atlantic health system advanced toward benchmark performance on the EHOA, it saw:
- Moderation in medical cost trends
- Reductions in hospital admission rates and cost per admission
- Increased adult preventive care visits
- Improved employee satisfaction with health and wellbeing efforts
Employees reported a greater sense of commitment, and aggregate biometric and health risk assessment results improved, reinforcing the link between a healthier workforce and a stronger organization.
HealthNEXT’s Program: A Proven Way to Improve Employee Health and Wellbeing
For employers facing similar pressures, HealthNEXT makes these kinds of results repeatable. Using our research-tested assessment, we measure and score the health and safety of your workforce against a 1000‑point benchmark, so you can clearly see where you stand and what to do next. We then sequence the right projects in the right order, backed by proven best practices from high-performing organizations, to help you reach and sustain benchmark-level performance.
Unlike traditional consultants or brokers, HealthNEXT embeds an experienced chief medical officer as a strategic advisor to your team, helping you interpret data, pressure-test vendor performance, and translate clinical insight into practical next steps. You keep control and customization; we provide the methodology, roadmap, and expert guidance that reduce HR workload, improve data confidence, and moderate medical cost trends while strengthening retention, performance, and long-term workforce sustainability.