SCCAD’s Strategic Integration of Healthcare Benefits

Every day, the St. Charles County Ambulance District (SCCAD) medics look out for the lives of over 400,000 St. Charles area residents. In return, SCCAD looks out for its medics.

“We take very, very good care of our employees,” says Brooke Snyder, Director of Human Resources at SCCAD. “In the almost 19 years I’ve been involved in human resources, I have never seen a benefits platform like SCCAD offers.”

“But we were hearing from our employees that a lot of them didn’t have a primary care physician,” Brooke continues. “Or if they did, it was taking them weeks, if not months to get in to see the doctor. So they would go to urgent care or to the emergency room because to them it was an urgent, emergent issue. That comes at a huge cost to SCCAD and to their long-term health.”

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“However, it wasn’t just as easy as myself and Chief Cope or Chief Lewis approving this. It had to go through our board,” she explains. “Their most important measure of success for it was to make sure people are using it and that people are happy with it. And they want to make sure the value that we’re getting far outweighs the expense that we’re putting through. Because at the end of the day, the board is the fiduciary for the taxpayers.”

While reducing current healthcare costs is always a priority, Brooke also knew that as the organization grows and adds more people to its self-funded insurance, she needed to proactively keep future costs under control. “In five years, we’ve added over 100 people,” she says. “We’ll really be able to see savings going back to the people with things such as incentivizing them to get their physicals every year and participating in the things that help keep workers’ comp claims down. Rezilient is key to us being able to do that.”

Rezilient’s emphasis on preventative health and longer, more thorough routine appointments has literally been life saving for one of SCCAD’s board members. “He went in for a regular checkup and ended up having to have heart surgery very, very quickly after because the clinic found something.”

Demographic change was a driver for her too: a growing population of younger SCCAD employees who may still have 3-4 years left on their parents’ health insurance meant she needed to change her mindset and deliver benefits they would actually use, like onsite primary care.

“Our younger people, they don’t care about the money. They care about time,” Brooke explains. “We’ve seen a lot of them using it because they can get in so quickly — it’s convenient, they can get in within a couple of hours normally. That’s huge for them. And they form a habit to come back for routine check ups because they really, really like the clinic experience.”

With what SCADD has saved on by reducing spend on big ticket healthcare costs like emergency room and urgent care visits, it has been able to pass on to employees through improvements in the organization’s infrastructure. “Primarily, we saw Rezilient as an investment into our people. But we have quickly been able to take those savings back and put them to good use elsewhere,” she continues. “We could say ‘It’s not only going to benefit you medically, physically, and mentally, it’s also going to be able to give you other things that you might want in the organization.’”

As part of the partnership, Brooke’s team and Rezilient’s client success team meet regularly to come up with some unique strategies to communicate with an employee population with wildly different schedules. “Our medics work in shifts: 48 hours on, then 96 off,” Brooke says. “It’s challenging to get in front of all our people in general. But the activation and engagement is great regardless, because often they can just walk into the CloudClinic and be seen almost straight away.”

Brooke’s final word for anyone considering working with Rezilient? “If primary care is a focus for your employees, then this is the way to go.”