This article comes from Fox Business News. United Benefit Advisors LLC one of the nation’s leading employee benefits advisory organizations, today announced key findings from its 2008 UBA Employer Opinion Survey, which delineates employers’ specific health care strategies, health benefits philosophy and opinion, health plan management, and Consumer Driven Health Care.The release of the 2008 UBA Employer Opinion Survey contains representative responses from employers by both region and employer size. Of the 1,664 employers polled, 72.5% have or want to have a wellness program that utilizes a health risk assessment; and 59.2% have or desire to implement a chronic disease management program. The survey also found that employers with 200 or more employees were 54% more likely to describe themselves as “leading edge” or “fairly quick” to adopt wellness programs. Firms with more than 1,000 employees produced results that indicated they were two-and-a-half times as likely to describe themselves as “leading edge” or “fairly quick” concerning disease management program adoption.

“The tide has clearly turned in that the majority of employers believe in the long-term value and positive impact that comprehensive wellness and disease management programs provide,” said William Stafford, Vice President, Member Services for UBA. “Keeping the healthy employees healthy while stabilizing and/or improving the health of employees with chronic conditions will dramatically improve everyone’s health and quality of life.” Click here to read the rest of the survey results and article.

This post comes from Fox News and AP Wire Services.

Aetna’s SmartSource search site would ramp up the way electronic health information is used, even as privacy concerns rise with an increased interest among companies to find new applications for electronic health records.

SmartSource crunches data such as gender, age, ZIP code, employer, health care plan and information from the customer’s personal health records.

The search engine generates information tailored to individuals about diseases and medical conditions, treatments, health care costs and local health care providers.

Aetna will make the search engine available as a pilot program this year to between 20 and 25 employers with up to 1.5 million eligible employees, and make the service available to more customers next year.

Healthline Networks, a privately held San Francisco-based health search engine that was founded in 1999 as YourDoctor.com, is providing the technology platform for Aetna’s search engine.

The Hartford-based insurer is banking on strong interest in Web-based health information and the drive to make patients better informed and in charge of their own health care.

But privacy advocates have been wary about electronic health records, warning about possible security breaches even though insurers insist information is secure.

Aetna officials said the Web site uses encryption standards similar to the banking industry and access to its Web site takes customers to Healthline’s secure site.

Mohit Ghose, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group of 1,300 health insurance plans, said insurance customers are protected by many safeguards, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, commonly called HIPAA, and state privacy laws.

But Sue Blevins, president of the Institute for Health Freedom in Washington, D.C., said the new ways health records are used raises concerns. For example, customers should be notified when their health information is transferred, whether from Aetna to Healthline Networks or other companies, she said.

Blevins also said it’s not clear that HIPAA covers companies that store electronic records, and that the federal law may need to be updated.

Google Inc. announced last month it will begin storing medical records of a few thousand people. The service is not yet available publicly. And Microsoft Corp. last year introduced a service called HealthVault that manages health information.

This article comes from Inc.com.

Despite rising health insurance costs in recent years, most small businesses continue to offer the same level of employee benefits, a new study shows.

Between 2000 and 2005, employee insurance costs rose by 30 percent for businesses with fewer than 25 employees, according to a joint report by the Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City, Mo.-based entrepreneurship advocacy group, and the RAND Corporation, a Santa Monica-Calif.-based research group. Because businesses of this size tend to require participation in insurance plans, they were most affected by higher insurance prices, researchers said.

Yet, over the same five-year period, the number of small businesses offering benefits remained steady, dropping by less than 1.5 percent, the study found.

“Perhaps these small businesses — and ultimately, their employees — were willing to accept the burden of rising health insurance costs, even if it meant giving up wage increases,” Christine Eibner, an associate economist at RAND, said in a statement. “What we don’t know is whether small companies and their employees will continue to make this tradeoff,” she added.

The study, which was based on a survey of more than 2,500 businesses nationwide, also found that smaller businesses were slightly less likely to offer dental or drug coverage than larger firms, and often had higher deductibles.

This post comes from Philly.com.

“A majority of doctors support the idea of a national health insurance program, according to a new report in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Overall, 59 percent of the 2,193 physicians surveyed by researchers at Indiana University said they now “support government legislation to establish national health insurance.”

The level of support was highest among psychiatrists (83 percent), pediatricians (71 percent), and emergency room doctors (69 percent). A majority of general surgeons also supported such a program to extend coverage to all, including the estimated 47 million uninsured Americans.

“Across the board, more physicians feel that our fragmented and for-profit insurance system is obstructing good patient care,” said the study’s coauthor, Ronald T. Ackermann, associate director of the Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research at Indiana’s medical school.

The survey also asked the doctors about state-level efforts, such as in Pennsylvania, to expand access to health insurance. It found that 55 percent of respondents supported such measures, although they expressed a preference for a national approach.

In December, the American College of Physicians, the second-largest doctors’ organization in the nation, endorsed a so-called single-payer health insurance system for the first time.”