For businesses of all types, it pays to help their employees attain and maintain optimal health and wellness. According to a
report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, research has shown that healthy employees are productive and engaged employees. According to
Gallup, the well-being of employees has “serious implications for business outcomes.”
The healthcare sector has realized that more and more businesses want to enhance the well-being of their employees, and medical care networks across the United States now offer services to businesses of a wide variety of sizes and types so they can have healthy and productive employees. These wellness programs are offered by institutions like the
Cleveland Clinic and teaching-focused networks like
Vanderbilt Health.
Closer to home,
Parkview Health, a Fort Wayne-based nonprofit network of hospitals and healthcare facilities that serves Northeast Indiana and Northwest Ohio, has its own employer-focused wellness program.
More than 5,000 employers use
Parkview Employer Solutions, says Melissa McKown, vice president of Employer Solutions for Parkview Health. The majority use Parkview’s
occupational health services, which includes treatment of injuries, testing for drugs and alcohol, onsite wellness services and ensuring
OSHA compliance.
Parkview began occupational health services 35 years ago, and through the years, those services have evolved into more comprehensive employer solutions. The program was named Health Plan Services and Parkview Total Health before taking its current name, Parkview Employer Solutions, in 2021.
![]()
Parkview Employer Solutions“Despite the name changes, the goal has always remained to improve the financial health of companies and the physical and mental health of their employees,” says McKown.
The care that Parkview provides to participating businesses and their employees is comprehensive. It includes wellness screenings and coaching, diabetes care and prevention, physicals, injury care and occupational health services. Parkview also provides education focused on prevention.
Parkview has two health plan options for businesses, depending on their size and individual needs: Parkview Signature Care and Parkview Select Care.
Parkview Signature Care is a PPO (preferred provider organization) network for self-funded or partially self-funded employers. The network now comprises more than 21,000 providers, including all providers under the Parkview umbrella. Other in-network hospitals include the Cleveland Clinic, Indiana University Health and University of Michigan Health.
Parkview Select Care encompasses a product centered on Parkview Physicians Group providers and other providers that are part of the associated extended network, plus hospital care at any of Parkview’s hospital facilities.
Several other options can be customized to fit an employer’s needs too. Dr. Greg Johnson, regional market president for Parkview Health, says that plans are about 80 percent standardized and 20 percent customized. Meeting an employer’s needs is always the aim.
“We want to partner with our regional employers, whether they’re school systems, local governments, municipalities or private companies,” says Johnson. “We want to partner with them to obviously keep their co-workers as healthy as possible and productive, but also to do that in the context of controlling the total cost of care.”
![]()
Dr. Greg Johnson, regional market president for Parkview HealthOne way to keep healthcare costs down for both companies and individuals, says Johnson, is to reduce emergency room visits. While emergency rooms provide care to anyone who walks through their doors on a 24-hour basis, such visits are expensive. Plus, if patients who visit the emergency room aren’t experiencing true emergencies, that visit could take resources away from patients who are.
“If they don’t need to be in the emergency room, we don’t want them there,” says Johnson.
Reducing visits to the emergency room is also a positive metric that shows the success of the Employer Solutions program, he says.
“We sometimes call [excess emergency room usage] inappropriate utilization, or there’s a better way for them to get the care that they need versus the higher cost of an emergency room,” Johnson says. “It’s not about generating more dollars for Parkview; it’s about getting the right care to the patient at the right time in the right setting and at the right cost. It’s the most appropriate thing to do, and it helps keep the total cost down. We want to partner with employers to help them create a competitive advantage by controlling their healthcare dollars.”
The best type of healthcare is preventive care (which can keep people out of the emergency room too), and this is the goal of the
Parkview Workplace Wellness program. In this facet of Parkview Employer Solutions, wellness experts offer onsite blood pressure and cholesterol screenings, as well as other pertinent medical tests. One-on-one consultations with employees are also available.
Because being healthy extends far beyond just physical health, Parkview offers an
Employee Assistance Program that includes grief counseling, financial counseling, crisis intervention, stress management and more.
One of the most popular services Parkview offers is
Employer Clinics. The clinic can be tailored to an employer’s requirements. Standard clinic services include disease treatment and prevention, acute care, preventive care, lab testing and prescribing of medicine. Clinic personnel can involve an array of staff, including but not limited to a medical director, advanced practice provider, nurse, medical assistant, dietician and lifestyle change specialist.
![]()
A Parkview Employer ClinicDepending on the needs of an employer, an Employer Clinic can be onsite and serve a single company, multiple businesses can share an Employer Clinic and the clinic can also be offered virtually, where employees use a designated space at their company to virtually visit with a healthcare provider.
Sammy Rattliff, the head of Employee Care at Intellectual Technology, Inc. (ITI), which has its corporate offices in Fort Wayne, says that, for him, joining as a member of Parkview’s newest shared Employer Clinic model has been one of the best aspects of their partnership with Parkview Employer Solutions.
“This is one of the only things I have ever implemented that I have not received any negative feedback on,” Rattliff says. “Everything has been overwhelmingly positive.”
He says that clinic visits are longer than what a patient at a typical clinic would get, and he sees the Employer Clinic for ITI as essentially a “precision-care model.”
Employer Clinics focus on both acute care and the treatment of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, which plays an outsized negative role in Indiana and across the United States. According to the
American Diabetes Association, more than 600,000 Hoosiers have diabetes—that’s almost 12 percent of the state’s population. Additionally, close to two million Indiana residents have prediabetes, meaning that blood sugar levels are too high but aren’t quite high enough to be considered diabetes.
Parkview provides onsite diabetes care for participating businesses. This care includes identifying employees who have diabetes and monitoring their health regularly. Care for patients living with diabetes involves bloodwork, education, medical and nutritional therapy, lifestyle coaching and, if needed, referrals. They also offer the Healthy You program, which emphasizes weight loss and provides education on lifestyle and behavior changes for members.
“It’s not just a weight loss program,” says McKown. “We are proactively engaging members identified as having metabolic syndrome to participate in a six-month program which provides individualized medical care, with an emphasis on lifestyle and behavior changes that will improve their health.”
Other types of care are designed for both workers on the factory floor and executives in the corporate suite. For employees who use their bodies at work, Parkview has instituted Proactive Injury Care, which puts to use the
NIOSH Total Worker Health model. The focal points are ergonomics and reducing the risk of musculoskeletal injuries. C-suite managers and administrators can benefit from the Parkview Executive Lifestyle Management Program, which offers physicals that are much more detailed than just a standard checkup. Scans, bloodwork and more identify risks for cancer, heart disease and other ailments.
All of these efforts are designed to optimize the well-being—physical and mental—of workers who call Northeast Indiana and Northwest Ohio home, and the financial health of companies who employ those workers.
“Healthcare is expensive—it just is,” says Johnson. “The better we can partner with these employers to control and manage their healthcare spend, the more competitive they can be in their respective industry.”