At the recent Ascend! conference in Nashville, we caught up with Russ Blakely, President of Russ Blakely & Associates. In the course of our conversation, it became apparent that Russ is doing a lot of the things "the right way," and we decided to invite him to the program to talk about best practices. Russ provides a great example of the things he's doing in the benefits arena that you can likely learn from and implement in your own practice.
In this wide-ranging discussion, we cover how taking ownership of client problems may lead you to saving money, and when it makes sense to implement onsite clinics and pharmacies and how that may impact the pharma and medical spend. We also talk about how Russ has created a proprietary physician network and what it did for their firm, as well as how they discover "at-risk" employees and what conditions they find most prevalent within a given market.