A game-changer for employers looking to cut costs and gain control

With healthcare costs continuing to rise, employers are seeking new ways to rein in spending without sacrificing the quality of benefits. This partnership enables Healthee clients to optimize prescription drug management, reducing costs through preferable generic drug pricing, high-touch chronic care programs, and more.

“For years, employers have struggled with the lack of clarity and oversight in their pharmacy benefits,” said Guy Benjamin, CEO and Co-founder of Healthee. “With Northwind Pharmaceuticals, we are changing the benefits game — offering our clients a new level of control over their prescription drug spend and empowering them to make data-driven benefits decisions that impact their bottom line.”

A shared commitment to transparency and value

The collaboration is built on a shared commitment to cost transparency, employer empowerment, and improved employee health outcomes. Healthee and Northwind share a unified vision for a clear and navigable healthcare system that helps employees get healthier.

By merging the mechanics behind Northwind’s pass-through PBM model into the Healthee ecosystem, employers can gain clearer insights into their benefits offering and the peace of mind of price and rebate transparency.

Phillip Berry, CEO and Founder of Northwind Pharmaceuticals expressed his enthusiasm for the partnership, saying, “Employers deserve better stewardship of their prescription investment — solutions that prioritize clarity, efficiency, and affordability. By partnering with Healthee, we are ensuring that more companies can take advantage of cost-saving opportunities in a high-quality pharmacy benefit that actually improves the health of their employees.”

About Northwind Pharmaceuticals

Northwind invites employers, advisors, partners, and plan members into our stewardship model to improve lives, achieve better outcomes, and manage the health investment wisely. Through a unique combination of pharmacy logistics, transparent pharmacy benefit management, clinical programs, and advanced analytics, Northwind provides white-glove service to clients and members while driving down total cost of care and improving health outcomes.

About Healthee

Healthee is a leading company in the health tech industry, focused on transforming how employees navigate healthcare and benefits. With a mission to make access to a healthier life effortless, Healthee utilizes AI technology to simplify complex benefits systems, enhancing user experience, cutting costs, and improving care outcomes. The Healthee platform is designed to make healthcare more accessible, personalized, and efficient. For more information, visit Healthee.com or connect with Healthee on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, X, and YouTube.

For more information, please contact:
Katherine Lurk
VP, Clinical Strategies
Northwind
katherine.lurk@northwindhealth.com

One of our client partners frequently describes employee health struggles in terms of getting caught up in the “overhwelm” of it all. The “overwhelm” is that place where options and barriers coalesce into a sense of paralysis or despair. A place where the struggle of it all weighs us down in the burdens of our own limitations, choices, and consequences. When it comes to managing health, there is plenty of “overwhelm” to go around.

Northwind has created a suite of Clinical Blueprints^TM designed to remove the barriers of access, cost, and complexity facing plan sponsors and the members they serve. For us, addressing access and cost barriers have been pretty straight forward. In a world of PBM obfuscation, spread pricing, and rebate games, helping plans and members simply access medications less expensively has been step one for driving great engagement, reducing total health costs, and getting better outcomes.

However, complexity or the “overwhelm,” is a bit trickier. Sure, there’s the “overwhelm” of cost and access, but the next big barrier for all of us as sponsors of healthcare are the personal struggles, the social determinants, that ensnare so many people in a massive net of despair, disappointment, and frustration with the basic functions of daily living.

Perhaps the answer to complexity is not so terribly complex.

Frequently, we are honored to receive stories about how Northwind’s Clinical Blueprint^TM programs impact the lives of individuals and their families. Since joining the team, I’ve silently wondered what it is about our approach to disease management that leads people to change their lives for the better – beyond better use of medications and improvement in clinical outcomes. Patients in our programs consistently demonstrate newfound motivation to transform their lifestyle behaviors – focused effort toward eating better and moving more – to positively influence their overall health.

Until recently, I attributed these efforts solely to the work of our pharmacists and health coaches leveraging Northwind’s programmatic approach to removing cost and access barriers to medications for patients engaged in our programs. While these are vital pieces to the puzzle, many condition management programs offer versions of these offerings, so what’s making the difference for Northwind?

Through a recent pharmacist consult with a Northwind patient, I had a profound moment of clarity. After the clinical review, the patient was elated to tell me how he had been able to focus on his nutrition because he had time to think about what he should eat. Then, he described his excitement over the daily bike rides he had started because he now had time to take bike rides. Finally, he told me of his delight when he noticed his medication supply getting low and went to email the pharmacy for refills only to find the confirmation email that his medications had been refilled and were on the way!

It was in this moment that the Northwind difference became very clear. Through our programmatic approach for chronic disease management, whether diabetes or obesity, Northwind most certainly removes medication cost and access barriers.

But there’s more to it. Many patients managing chronic illness face ongoing underlying concerns around whether they will be able to get their medications, afford their medications, how they will be able to track down all their needed supplies, wonder if they will get refills in time, and the list goes on. In addition to this, we, as healthcare providers, ask patients to eat better, move more, sleep 8 hours every night, self-monitor at home, etc.

By directly addressing and removing some of the stress and constant background noise created by worry, we’ve helped patients create space to develop intrinsic motivation to improve their lifestyle choices. We’re seeing patients proactively make decisions to live better for themselves because now they can.

All of us have a defined bandwidth that can only absorb so much. When we are at our capacity with work, family, the stress and worry about life happenings, medication affordability, access, side effects, self-monitoring blood pressure, blood glucose, weight, and more, there is no space to add more to our mental and emotional plate. By alleviating the “overwhelm” of cost, shipping medications and supplies directly to patients’ doors, and providing expert clinical support through pharmacist and health coach engagements, Northwind frees up some personal bandwidth that can be reinvested in something even more meaningful. Something that we, as a program provider, can’t do.

With more available bandwidth, newly freed up space, people develop new motivation to invest in themselves. Northwind has helped them better manage their diabetes or their weight, and now these patients feel better, want to live long, healthy lives, and use their “new space” to invest in themselves in a way nothing else can. By eliminating even a portion of the constant noise, people can focus on something else, something bigger and more important for their life: the choices they make every day to influence their future.

As plan sponsors, care providers, and plan administrators, we will never be able to remove all barriers or all struggle in the lives of those we serve. However, we can ensure that the dollars we invest in our programs are hitting their mark by removing access, cost, and complexity barriers holding our members back from having the best opportunity to thrive. We can help create “space” for better choices, greater self-determination, and the hope that comes from owning the progress you see happening in your own health.

Self-funded plan sponsors face a critical stewardship decision around member demand for highly effective, and costly, anti-obesity medications. To cover or not to cover? The effectiveness of the medications makes the decision more complex as it highlights the role and the responsibility of the plan to be a good steward of financial and health resources.

Responsibility. It’s a powerful word. How far does responsibility to members go when it comes to their lifestyle choices and the consequences, and costs, of those choices? Plan sponsors have been balancing this question since the beginning but the stakes have increased as pharmaceutical options have proliferated to help ameliorate random disease as well as disease brought-on by lifestyle choices. We want the best for members but must also protect plan resources. A balance must be found.

Plan sponsors want to responsibly support members on their path to healthiness and are looking for programmatic pathways to managing the cost of new anti-obesity medications while maximizing their benefit to members. However, concerns lie in simply adding expensive medications to health plans without mechanisms for ensuring their appropriate use and effective management. The question is: how do we help our members benefit from these new products responsibly without driving costs through the roof?

A Blueprint for Success

Northwind’s Weight Management Clinical Blueprint pairs industry-leading health coaching focused on lifestyle behavior change with powerful weight loss medications.  Our innovative approach to sustainable weight loss is focused on an ongoing commitment by engaged individuals to invest in themselves and their overall health with improvement in lifestyle choices and appropriate use of anti-obesity medications. 

Through collaboration with our self-funded clients and clinical partners, we build programs that incorporate offerings within the existing benefit design to increase utilization of established resources.  In alliance with physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants, our program incorporates the expertise of clinically trained pharmacists to implement best practices for obesity management, ensure medication safety, navigate tolerability and dosing challenges, and optimize therapeutic outcomes. 

Our highly skilled health coaches are key in building strong connections with people and influencing lifestyle behavior change across the continuum.  They work diligently to meet people where they are, understand their challenges, and creatively build unique plans to generate forward progress.  Along with ongoing weight monitoring and goal tracking, engaged individuals are also monitored for presence and improvement of other weight-related complications. 

Ultimately, the goal for our Weight Management Clinical Blueprint is to help patients optimize the use of medications with adjustments in behavior to move to a higher state of healthiness. With clinical focus and programmatic management, we make sure the right medications are used in the right way at the right time and for the right duration. Side by side with plan sponsors and clinician partners, Northwind is committed to driving and maintaining successful weight loss that results in happier, healthier, more productive member populations. 

That is good stewardship.