Building on its success in the employer space, Garner Health is launching a partnership with Marathon Health, a leader in employer-sponsored primary care, to tackle wasteful spending related to specialist referrals out of its clinics. This venture expands upon Garner’s existing employee benefits solution, which works directly with employees to guide them to the top doctors in their existing network. With this new offering, Garner will provide physician performance insights to the Marathon care team who will leverage Garner’s platform to find the best specialists for their members. Employers can now leverage the power of these products together: one for direct employee engagement and the other for specialist referrals from direct primary care.
“For too long, primary care and care navigation have been held as separate,” said Nick Reber, founder and CEO of Garner. “Now there is an exciting opportunity to have both care navigation solutions and brick and mortar clinics to be powered by the same dataset.” Employers can augment their savings potential by directly implementing the Garner platform and by partnering with Marathon to further guide employees to the highest quality sites of care.
Marathon’s industry-leading primary care platform is the perfect national partner to build on Garner Health’s mission of reducing healthcare costs by helping patients identify the highest-quality doctors. Marathon’s in-house referral coordinator team is renowned for their commitment to service for their patients. This high touch team spends an average of an hour per referral making sure the patient gets the support they need, including researching options, checking eligibility, and scheduling appointments. We are excited to directly support their team with best-in-class cost and quality data, and support them in bringing better outcomes and more affordable care to their patients.
“Human-centered navigation has long been a hallmark of our patient experience, and the Garner partnership puts cutting-edge quality and cost data in our navigators’ hands for each and every referral,” says Jeff Wells, MD, co-founder and CEO of Marathon Health.
At Garner, we have spent years aggregating and analyzing data to better understand the tremendous waste present in the US healthcare system, and paths forward to improving outcomes. The findings from our research have been clear: selecting the right doctor is the single biggest decision a patient can make on their quality outcomes and total cost of care. At the same time, however, until now it has been almost impossible to find clear, accurate data on provider performance. We have made it our mission at Garner to deliver this transparency to patients and help them find the highest-quality doctors. Our partnership with Marathon Health represents a key step toward the realization of this goal.
Garner’s novel employee benefit programs and plan designs have already helped thousands across the country find the best doctors in their community, driving significant savings on healthcare spend for employers and their employees. Partnering with Marathon to help deliver data-driven specialist referrals to their patients represents an expansion of our ability to bring these performance insights into the hands of more healthcare consumers.
About Marathon Health
Marathon Health partners with employers around the United States to deliver a healthcare experience that’s convenient and drives real behavior change that results in better health outcomes and financial savings. Employers save an average of $2,000 per year for each employee who engages with Marathon Health, with the average company saving around $11 million. Marathon Health delivers its advanced primary care solution across more than 265 onsite, Network and virtual health centers in 42 states. Marathon Health was named Best in KLAS 2021 and 2020 for its excellence in Worksite Health Services. For more information, please visit www.marathon-health.com.
About Garner Health
Garner Health Technology, Inc. is a health technology company that offers both a benefit program that helps employees find the best doctors in their community, and a novel tool to power data-driven provider referrals. Using a new approach to data science and novel financial incentives, Garner is able to lower out-of-pocket spending for employees, save employers 10% or more on overall health benefit costs, and provide doctors with the tools to make more informed referrals for their patients.