One of the Nation’s Leading Health Care Providers Sticks to its Cooperative Roots
Organization Utilizes the Best of Cooperative Features
With more than 12,000 employees in Minnesota and Western Wisconsin, HealthPartners provides care, coverage, research and education to improve the health of members, patients and the community. As the topranked commercial health plan in Minnesota, it is also ranked among the top 25 private plans in the nation according to NCQA’s Health Insurance Plan Rankings 2011-12, while its Medicare plan is ranked #11 in the nation. HealthPartners’ 2011 annual revenue was just under $3.9 billion.
The HealthPartners Board is made up of members and elected by members — ensuring ongoing feedback and insight from the customers who use the system and are directly impacted by management’s decisions. Other sources of member feedback include patient councils, annual meetings, comments posted via the website, surveys and the member services department.
Because of its non-profit status and cooperative roots, HealthPartners has a unique governance structure that allows it to re-invest in care and services that will improve members’ health. The structure also helps to generate better ideas, and allows HealthPartners to be more agile than other organizations.
Rather than answering to shareholders, HealthPartners’ board is governed by members — meaning, for example, that during the recent economic downturn, the organization could remain focused on high quality, affordable health care and an exceptional experience, rather than profit margins. In fact, its goal is to maintain a two percent profit margin to cover reinvestment in facilities, programs and services. Most publicly traded organizations, in contrast, aim for profit margins of 15-20 percent.
Today, HealthPartners is the ninth largest employer in the area, and insures nearly one in four residents in the Twin Cities metro area. HealthPartners has some of the lowest administrative costs in the country, and at the same time, offers members far greater cost transparency in care and service than other players in the health care market.
