Managing a Healthy Workforce
HUMAN CAPITAL MANAGEMENT GIVES PREMERA BLUE CROSS A STRONG ADVANTAGE.
t’s the big unknown in the U.S. healthcare industry: what
is the full impact of the sweeping regulatory changes intro-
duced by the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act?
No one is certain how the implementation of the law will play
out, but the changes could be transformative. Add data privacy
concerns and rapidly increasing healthcare costs, and it is
clear that the health insurance industry faces significant—and
evolving—challenges.
For Premera Blue Cross, a health benefits company that
serves 1. 6 million people in Washington and Alaska, the solution is simple. Leadership is looking to its biggest and most valuable asset to maintain competitive advantage—its employees.
“Without great talent, we really can’t be successful,” says
Barbara Magusin, senior vice president of human resources at
Premera. “Our company invests huge energy into finding the
right people and making sure that we optimize their contribu-
tions by training them for new and different types of work over
their careers and putting together a value proposition to retain
them. Managing all these pieces and getting them in the right
balance is a part of our business.”
And while Premera has received numerous accolades for
being an employee-focused company, management realized that
more could be done to put data from its human capital man-
agement (HCM) system to work for the company’s more than
3,000 associates. According to Magusin, Premera wanted to do
more-strategic analysis to hire and retain the right staff with the
right skills to successfully navigate market challenges and spark
the innovation the company needs to grow and thrive.
