Page 9 - BusinessWest September 1, 2021

really have a chance to revisit those until the next year,” he explained. “And we obviously don’t know what the ser- vices are going to be or what new tech- nologies are going to emerge.”
Elaborating, he said that telehealth technology certainly came of age dur- ing COVID, and Health New England, like many health plans, had previ- ously created a telehealth benefit for members.
“In all of 2019, we had something like 850 or 900 total claims for tele- health visits; over the past year, it has averaged almost 30,000 per month,” he noted, citing this as just one example of how quickly and profoundly the landscape can change and health plans can be impacted by those changes.
Vaccines are another example, he said, adding that health plans couldn’t anticipate a two-dose vaccine when they set rates for 2021 last year, and they couldn’t have anticipated a boost- er, or third shot, as they set rates for next year.
“COVID has brought a tremendous level of uncertainty,” Swift went on. “So all of us who put plans and benefits and rates in place for 2021 did that in the summer of 2020 in the middle of COVID, trying to understand what that would look like, and we’re doing it now for 2022, and we don’t know what next month is going to look like, let alone six months from now.”
As noted earlier, the surge in claims and other factors have generated losses for some health plans in recent quar- ters and prompted layoffs and cut- backs as well.
Health New England has been able to avoid such cuts, he said, adding that, in the meantime, it has been able to maintain and, in many ways, increase its financial support to the community and its business community, some- thing Swift takes great pride in.
“Even with everything going on
with COVID, we’ve continued, and increased, the community support in terms of activities, foundations, grants, and actually providing PPE and hand sanitizer to people who didn’t have the wherewithal and the ability to get it themselves,” he said. “A lot of compa- nies have turned inward, and many of them have laid people off; we made a conscious decision not to lay people off if we could at all avoid it, and for- tunately, we have been able to avoid that.”
Elaborating, he said the company adjusted some of its sponsorship activ- ity to accommodate what it would call “COVID mini grants,” roughly $300,000 worth of them that were awarded to community organizations that needed support to address their COVID-related needs.
In addition, the company created Where Health Matters grants, multi- year grants totaling $50,000 to $150,000 awarded to organizations to help
offset the effects of COVID on their operations.
“
level of uncertainty. So all of us who put plans and benefits and rates in place for 2021 did that in the summer of 2020 in the middle of COVID, trying
to understand what that would look like, and we’re doing it now for 2022, and we don’t know
what next month is going to look like, let alone six
”
Giving the Forecast
Moving forward, Swift said the com- pany would continue its pattern of flexibility and responsiveness to chang- ing conditions as a fall shrouded by uncertainty approaches.
As he talked with BusinessWest,
he noted that he was one of very few employees in the building that day, and things would probably remain that way for the foreseeable future. Employ- ees were slated to return, in a hybrid format, by this time, he went on, but there is now more of a wait-and-see approach than a definitive schedule.
Meanwhile, Health New England has joined a growing number of busi-
COVID has brought a tremendous
RICHARD SWIFT
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FEATURE
SEPTEMBER 1, 2021 9
BusinessWest