Effective Enrollment Model:

All of our Condition Management programs are purely confidential and voluntary for all of your eligible policy holders and their family members. We utilize an “opt-in” enrollment model to target those individuals who have high health risks and the highest motivation to change their health situation.

Support and Motivation

August Health Management also believes in providing motivation for change. We provide incentives to participants in our Condition Management programs. We also offer co-pay reimbursements for physician office visits related to their chronic condition for the duration of their enrollment in the program.

Expert Resources:

August Health Management combines innovative data analysis tools, disease-specific clinical pathways, tele-health technology, and our staff ’s deep expertise to help our clients better manage their healthcare costs. In addition, assistance and support provided to your eligible customers or employees and their family members is based on internationally accepted, evidence-based practice guidelines and condition-specific documentation.

Our Wellness programs are a comprehensive approach to improving health, reducing risk, and increasing productivity. With online, telephonic and on-site components, our programs emphasize a participant-centered approach to improving health. This approach offers organizations a meaningful opportunity to encourage the lasting changes in individual behavior that have been shown to lower health risks and reduce healthcare costs across entire populations.

This is accomplished by:

Ensuring active engagement between participants and coaches at appropriate intervals. Rewarding healthy behaviors and goal accomplishment through incentives.Leveraging cutting edge technology to ensure consistency and state of the art reporting.

Our Wellness Programs include:

• WeightLoss
• Healthy Heart
• Healthy Aging
• Healthy Diet
• Cancer-Fighting
• StressRelief
• Diabetes-Fighting
• GetFit
• Smoking Cessation
• Custom

The August Health Management Disease Management Program has adopted a new model of care, which is emerging in the health management landscape as a more effective way to attract a rapidly growing number of ailing employees and health plan members who want to be healthier but feel overwhelmed by the idea of changing their lifestyles.

Our approach to care is based on the philosophy that only when individuals become healthier can populations become healthier. It involves moving away from standardized programs in which each person receives the same intervention strategies for each risk or illness.

August Health Management’s caring nurses, specialists and coaches expertise in health improvement support individuals who desire better health with a variety of tools, technologies, skills and knowledge to help them define and succeed with their personal health goals by making healthier choices.

We provide educational materials to moderate and lower risk members to help them manage their conditions and avoid complications. These conditions include: Diabetes, Asthma, and Coronary Artery Disease, and Behavioral Health.

Our Diabetes program helps people with diabetes to control the disease and prevent costly medical events in the future. We help participants understand their illness and the serious health effects from not adhering to care plans and alter unhealthy lifestyle behaviors that contribute to their condition.

August Health Management provides configurable solutions designed to address this high-cost, high-risk population.

Our clinicians proactively contact participants to make sure they are adhering to their treatment plans. This may include medications, a healthy diet, exercise to control weight and both at-home and outpatient testing for blood glucose, cholesterol and fatty acids.

We provide support groups to create a sense of community within this group of participants and in turn increase awareness ensuring individuals proactive compliance in managing their disease leading to reduced hospitalizations and emergency room visits, increased productivity and less absenteeism.

The Asthma Program supports people with asthma to educate them about their chronic condition, improve their compliance with medication therapies and help them identify and avoid situations that trigger asthma episodes.

AWith a focus on prevention, our educational materials and respiratory specialty nurses help patients become more productive at work or school, improve their quality of life and reduce emergency room and physician office visits, all of which lower asthma-related healthcare costs.

We help them:

• Recognize the early symptoms of an asthma attack
• Learn how to prevent an attack or what to do during an attack
• Identify their specific “asthma triggers,” such as dust, mold, cold air, cigarette smoke, allergies or exercise and how to manage those triggers (e.g., taking medication before exercise)

The CAD Program lowers healthcare costs by helping program participants understand and better manage their illness and prevent disease progression, disability and the development of other chronic conditions.

At August we help participants with CAD to recognize symptoms that lead to the deterioration of their condition.

We provide configurable solutions designed to address the high-cost, high-risk population, as well as solutions that address all segments of a customer’s population.

We provide specialized nurses to help participants comply with their medication and treatment plans and change unhealthy lifestyle behaviors that negatively impact participant progress. Our goal is to help participants fully understand the serious health effects from not adhering to care plans.

Clinicians also work with participants to control CAD symptoms that lead to the worsening of their condition such as heart attacks, stroke or heart failure. As a result, CAD participants require fewer hospitalizations and costly treatment procedures, such as angioplasty and bypass surgery. They are more productive at work and experience an improved quality of life.

Most diet programs focus on weight-loss regimens and health education, but August Health Management believes each of these approaches fall short on their own of solving food addiction issues. The August Weight Management Program was designed to encourage and empower individuals via motivational and behavior change principles and goal-setting in a high-touch, 12-month telephonic coaching format.

August Health Management provides a psychological approach to addressing the underlying emotional and mental health issues driving food addiction.

August Health Management’s care managers help participants to set realistic target goals, build upon prior weight loss successes and increase motivation and self-confidence. We conduct comprehensive lifestyle assessments that screen for eating disorders, readiness to change and other psychological factors that could impact treatment success. These assessments are then used to establish a strategy to motivate individuals to want to change.

Through telephonic interactions, our care managers help program participants develop and maintain an individualized weight-loss plan and improve poor lifestyle habits that lead to clinical obesity. August Health Management’s integrated approach results in measurable differences in the participant’s quality of life and reductions in your organization’s health claims costs.

Anxiety Facts

Without proper treatment, these costs are expected to rise: the World Health Organization recently predicted that by the year 2020, anxiety will have grown to be one of the world’s largest disabilities.

Depression Facts

• Every year, depression is considered one of the highest factors in lost days of work
• Workplace depression drains billions from the world economy each year, mostly because of absenteeism and lower productivity.

Who Benefits:

August Health Management’s Behavioral Health program is designed for individuals diagnosed with Anxiety, Clinical Depression or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The Behavioral Health program is intended for individuals who:

• Are newly diagnosed or have been experiencing difficulty in managing Anxiety, Clinical Depression or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
• Need to better understand the importance of medication compliance
• Seek to adopt stress-reducing behaviors
• Are motivated to focus on self-management techniques to avoid future physician visits and hospital stays
• Want to maximize their productivity at home and work

August Health Management provides Comprehensive Case Management programs for participants with chronic and complex diagnoses involving multiple chronic conditions, catastrophic injuries and illnesses, and Cancer. These programs target individuals impacted by significant, rare and often life-limiting conditions.

Designed to help participants understand their diagnoses and prognoses and to make educated choices about their care, these highly-specialized programs provide participants with the following benefits:

• Improved quality of life
• Personalized care plans
• Personalized educational and psychosocial support
• End-of-life discussions
• Efficient utilization of healthcare services
• Coordination with healthcare providers
• Education and skill development to manage the difficult side effects of prescribed medical treatments

Case Management programs are based on a patient- centric primary case manager model and a team approach to educate, monitor and support participants. The programs are led by teams of experienced Medical directors board-certified in program-related specialties, such as Oncology, Pulmonology, Infectious Disease or Physical Medicine, who interact directly with the case managers and staff to provide participant support and conduct interventions with treating physicians and health plan medical directors.

Complex Case Management is designed to help the most seriously ill individuals. Complex patients rarely fit into the standard care guidelines and frameworks provided by their health insurance coverage. They often require special, expensive treatments and procedures ordered by multiple physicians. Care decisions are seldom well-coordinated or communicated among the patient’s multiple caregivers, which may result in duplicate, unnecessary or even inappropriate treatments and tests. The typical result is higher costs and decreased patient satisfaction. Moreover, the complex patient’s illness is often compounded by significant social or economic problems, which further complicates the picture.

August Health Management also offers a Chronic Complex program for individuals whose needs fall below the Complex Care level but who still require more attention and care than a traditional Disease Management program provides. What distinguishes our two programs is that Complex Care provides on-site care, and the Chronic Complex program is telephonic-based.

The Patient

The Complex Case Management program consists of focused, high intensity support. Savings are achieved through reductions in hospital utilization and related costs. More importantly, the hospital reduction occurs due to a voluntary reduction in services chosen by the patient as a result of education and the establishment of a strong support structure.

We define complex patients as those whose serious medical diagnosis is compounded by major social, psychological, or financial issues.

Typical characteristics of the cases we manage include:

• Significant, often life-limiting diagnoses such as late-stage cancer or end-stage chronic diseases; multiple serious co-morbidities;
• Care involving a large array of providers whose efforts are typically not coordinated;
• Personalized educational and psychosocial support
• Cases where serious psychological, pain management, social, and other non-medical needs detrimental to the patient are present and, thus, have the potential to drive cost

The full complexity of these patients’ situations is often under- recognized by their providers and by the healthcare delivery system. Patients in these unfortunate circumstances often feel isolated, disempowered, pain-ridden and frightened. Without highly specialized, focused attention, they often fall into a state of debilitating disease compounded by woefully inadequate social, financial and emotional support.

Our Team

Facing a serious illness can be frightening and confusing. Patients may wonder where to turn, how to learn about their treatment options and how to ensure that their beliefs and wishes are known.

As their advocate, the Complex Care Team helps patients, their families and their physician. If a patient is eligible for this program, a registered nurse called a Care Manager is assigned to that person. The nurse is 27 there to help patients take control, to protect their priorities, privacy and dignity; to provide them with information about their illnesses and healthcare options; and to help give them the freedom to take care of what is really important.

Other members of the Complex Care Team include the Clinical Account Manager and the August Health Management Medical Director. The Clinical Account Manager, who is also a registered nurse, works closely with the care manager to provide case direction and insight. The Medical Director is a practicing physician who reviews the care plan weekly with the other team members to anticipate issues and, if necessary, communicate them to the patient’s physician(s) in order to help the physician(s) determine the appropriate course of action.

August Health Management is proud to be a provider of comprehensive cancer treatment support programs. Through seasoned Oncology nurses, the August Health Management Oncology Program provides information and support to help patients improve their care, treatment plan compliance and outcome.

Our goal is to help patients obtain the most cost-effective care possible without sacrificing quality or access to a full range of treatment options.

How the Program Works

Cancer is an acute condition requiring care management for a short but intense period of time, usually from three to nine months, starting at the time of diagnosis and continuing throughout the follow-up process.

Each patient in August Health Management’s Cancer Management Program is assigned a care manager and has access to a nurse 24 hours a day, seven days a week, via a toll-free number. Responsible for coordinating the patient’s ongoing care, our care managers are nurses specializing in Oncology in a variety of cancer treatment settings, with an average of 10 years of experience.

Care managers report to the patient’s primary care treating physician as appropriate based on the patient’s clinical situation. They discuss treatment options with patients and their families, answer questions and provide appropriate educational materials as well as support.