The nascent movement for employers to open on-site health clinics for their workers might be regaining some steam.
Bloomington-based HealthPartners announced Friday that today it will open a new clinic in the Anoka County Courthouse just for county employees. Staffed by a nurse practitioner, the clinic will offer preventive and acute care services and some lab services.
It’s the fifth on-site clinic HealthPartners has opened since 2005, but only the first in nearly three years. HealthPartners and operators of similar on-site clinics across the country started reporting a slowdown in demand for the clinics with the economic recession, particularly in 2009.
Employers were reluctant to invest in the up-front cost of building workplace clinics, said John Hansen, the director of worksite health at HealthPartners.
“I think once the worst of the recession went by, employers started looking again,” Hansen said.
HealthPartners already has an agreement with another local employer to open another on-site clinic this year, Hansen said. The insurance company gave presentations to about 25 to 30 employers in 2010 about the possibility of opening on-site clinics for their employees; that was about twice the number of presentations given during 2009, Hansen said.
On-site clinics promise savings to employers by giving workers increased access to preventive care and chronic-disease management services.
The idea is that easy access to those kinds of care will help keep overall costs down.
The clinics also provide a roster of services that’s similar to what patients might find at a MinuteClinic or other retail health care provider.
Flu shots, treatment for minor cuts and suture removal are on the menu of services.
Whereas county employees must pay a copayment when they receive health services at a doctor’s office or retail clinic, there will be no copayment at the courthouse clinic, Hansen said.
“Companies were reluctant to put the investment in,” he said. “Now, they’re starting to look at … the purpose of these clinics. It’s to improve medical costs and increase productivity.”
A county spokeswoman said courthouse construction to create the Anoka clinic was minimal, although she couldn’t provide a price tag for the project. Rhonda Sivarajah, chair of the Anoka County Board of Commissioners, said in a news release that the clinic will help county workers provide better service to residents.
“If they have the convenience of care right down the hall, rather than having to leave their worksite, it’s a better value for the taxpayers’ dollar,” Sivarajah said in a statement.
Some executives and managers get upset about workers skipping out for a few hours during the day to see a doctor, said Tom Charland, a health care consultant with Merchant Medicine LLC in Shoreview. Those executives sometimes see on-site clinics as a solution, Charland said.
Others are drawn to the clinics for the promised improvements in costly chronic care for employees. It can be difficult, though, for on-site clinics to really show they make a difference in containing these costs, Charland said.
Finally, some employers think on-site clinics will provide employee convenience that’s a helpful tool in recruiting talented workers.
There’s some concern that a portion of the federal health care overhaul legislation that passed in 2010 could eventually create a tax penalty for firms that operate on-site clinics, Charland said.
That’s because the legislation stipulates that beginning in 2018, insurers can be taxed 40 percent on the amount of health insurance premiums that rise above certain dollar limits. It’s based on the argument that overly expensive “Cadillac” plans encourage overuse of medical care; employers believe the cost of on-site clinics will be factored into this tax and could push health plan costs above the limits, Charland said.
Still, Charland said: “The employers that have been interested in it are going full speed ahead.” He noted that some retail health providers such as MinuteClinic — which is now a division of Rhode Island-based CVS Caremark — are among the operators of on-site clinics.
The new center in Anoka is the fifth on-site clinic that HealthPartners has opened since 2005, but will be the fourth that it still operates.
A clinic that HealthPartners operated at the Hennepin County Government Center in Minneapolis for government employees is now operated by the Hennepin County Medical Center.
The county switched operators along with a switch away from HealthPartners insurance coverage effective the first of this year.
Christopher Snowbeck can be reached at 651-228-5479.
