Today’s complicated health care system often creates confusion for patients looking for answers about insurance coverage, finding the appropriate providers and choosing a health plan amidst a sea of options.
Ida Schnipper, managing partner of West Hartford-based Health Champion, helps people navigate the health care maze by advising and advocating through a variety of services for both employers and individuals.
Since Schnipper founded Health Champion in 2008, she has helped scores of people get the answers and information they need related to their own or a loved one’s health care. A nurse who has also worked for a health plan, Schnipper said she has always focused on the quality of care patients receive.
“So often, health care professionals are so consumed by the language they forget it’s foreign (to patients),” Schnipper said. “The language they use is not easily translatable. I’m somewhat passionate about making sure people understand everything about their health and their health care.”
Schnipper said Health Champion offers a core advocacy program for employers. The telephonic-based service allows employees facing health care decisions to hand off the responsibility so they can be productive at work.
“One phone call to Health Champion takes that problem off their shoulders,” she said. “When they spend a half-hour on the phone (with a provider or health insurance company), when they get off the phone they might not understand why something did not get paid, or why something wasn’t authorized. We have a way to navigate that.”
Schnipper said employers often don’t realize how much time employees are spending on health care-related phone calls and research during the work day.
“The goal for the employer is we want to help them maintain or improve productivity,” Schnipper said. “The person is anxious about a financial responsibility they didn’t think they had, or they don’t understand why they didn’t get coverage.”
Schnipper knows her system works. Health Champion recently received a phone call from a woman from Ohio, who found the company on the Internet, late on a Friday afternoon. She came home from work that day to find a hospital bill for $56,000, when she expected a bill of just $5,000.
“You can’t start calling people about this until Monday, but the ability to connect with Health Champion (helped her),” Schnipper said. “We said, ‘We can do this for you.’ You could just hear the anxiety in her voice go down by the end of the call.”
That’s not to say that Health Champion can get an insurance company to pay for something it originally denied in every case. But the group always works on behalf of the individual.
“We’re an impartial third party,” Schnipper said. “If something is not going to get paid or it’s just an exclusion in a benefit package, we tell the employee that, (and say), ‘Here are your options.’”
Health Champion services the entire U.S., and depending on the state, offers various programs, including customized care management programs, where a case manager is assigned to someone with a chronic disease; physician office advocacy, in which a nurse can be sent to the patient’s home in the event of catastrophic diagnoses; emergency room advocacy; health care retiree planning and concierge services for employees, mostly executives, which include researching physicians, appointment setting and bill paying.
Linda Spevacek, president of The Launch Companies and Schnipper’s business/executive coach, noted Schnipper’s passion for helping people navigate the health care system and Health Champion’s ability to offer employers and individuals a great service.
“It offers a lot of value from a monetary standpoint, but the peace of mind value is really huge, and I think it’s often overlooked,” Spevacek said.
Schnipper said there’s still a long way to go to ease the health care navigation process for patients, but she believes Health Champion plays a role in helping patients feel more comfortable with the system.
“There are still opportunities to connect the dots in terms of communication,” she said. “We’re really a safety net in many ways for our clients. I think everyone should have a health champion in their corner.”
STATS
Name: Ida Schnipper
Title: Managing Partner
Workplace: Health Champion
Address: 836 Farmington Avenue, Suite 223, West Hartford
Website: www.healthchampion.net
