In This Post:
Presenters:
Jason Chirichigno MD, MA
Board Certified Virtual Clinician, Clinical Systems Leader
Dan Kennedy
Chief Financial Officer
Today, employees employers evaluate the effectiveness of programs based on how practical and accessible they are. A successful preventive care strategy needs to consider questions that require both a clinical and financial perspective. Employers should look for ways to balance workforce health with financial sustainability.
As medical spending rises, employers and benefits professionals are looking beyond traditional cost-sharing and plan design changes for ways to improve employee health while managing long-term expenses. Healthcare and finance leaders need to explore what it takes to move preventive care beyond a benefit on paper and toward a strategy that creates sustainable value.
At our recent webinar, Dr. Jason Chirichigno, Clinical Systems Leader and Virtual Physician at Galileo, and Dan Kennedy, CFO at Galileo, discussed four questions employers should consider when evaluating a preventive care strategy. They explored a different way to think about the problem. Preventive care should be treated as a strategic investment in employee health and long-term cost management.
About Galileo
Galileo is an advanced primary care medical practice designed to deliver more comprehensive, connected care for nearly any condition or concern. By bringing primary, urgent, specialty, and behavioral healthcare together in one integrated practice, Galileo gives patients a go-to medical team that can resolve more of their care in-house.
Powered by a clinician-built technology platform and a multidisciplinary clinical team, Galileo delivers 24/7 access, longitudinal care, and the clinical depth to diagnose, treat, and manage complex needs. The result is higher-quality, more proactive care that improves outcomes while reducing unnecessary healthcare costs.
Prioritizing what matters most
Preventive care is often associated with annual wellness visits, health screenings, and services such as colon cancer and breast cancer screenings. While these services remain important, Galileo emphasized that prevention can extend much further.
The larger opportunity is identifying health risks early and intervening before they develop into more serious and costly conditions. The challenge is translating that principle into an effective employer strategy.
This approach also illustrates the value of continuous engagement. Instead of interacting with a patient only once every three to six months, digital care can create opportunities for more frequent check-ins and ongoing support.
A physician can help employers understand which areas deserve attention, where gaps may exist, and how prevention can fit into a broader approach to workforce health.
From a financial perspective, Kennedy described this as moving preventive care away from a “check-the-box” mentality and toward an investment mentality. That raises a different set of questions that are particularly important because healthcare savings are not necessarily immediately visible.
Preventive care is often an investment in reducing future risk. That makes financial accountability and appropriate measurement critical components of the strategy. The goal is to influence the trajectory of an individual’s health before problems become more difficult and expensive to manage.
Aligning clinical and financial goals
At first glance, physicians and CFOs may appear to evaluate preventive care through completely different lenses. One is focused primarily on health outcomes. The other is focused on financial performance. However, the two perspectives can be highly complementary.
Bringing clinical priorities and financial accountability together can help employers make more informed investment decisions. The opportunity is to identify where those priorities overlap. A preventive care strategy becomes much more powerful when clinical priorities and financial accountability are considered together.
Employees work different schedules, live in different locations, have different healthcare needs, and have different preferences for how they communicate. Galileo’s approach emphasizes meeting patients where they are through different modalities, including phone, video, texting, and asynchronous communication.
If a shift worker needs care when a traditional brick-and-mortar physician’s office is closed, a digital model can enable care to be accessed when it fits the employee’s schedule. Language accessibility aims to reduce barriers that can prevent people from seeking care.
Employees should have ways to engage with healthcare that fit their circumstances rather than having to fit themselves into a single model.
From a CFO perspective, employers should look beyond whether employees are using a healthcare solution and consider what happens as a result of that utilization. This distinction is particularly important when evaluating digital health solutions. The effectiveness of the model depends on what happens after an employee engages.
Measuring value - Can better health outcomes translate into lower costs
Healthcare strategy has often been framed as a trade-off between providing valuable benefits and controlling employer spending. By presenting preventive care and cost management as objectives that can work together, Galileo challenged that assumption. Kennedy pointed to several areas employers can monitor when evaluating the financial impact of a preventive care strategy, including total cost of care, avoidable emergency department visits, preventable hospital admissions, chronic disease management, and overall healthcare trends.
The clinical perspective adds another important dimension: earlier diagnosis and continuous management. Dr. Chirichigno explained that digital care can address some of the limitations of short, infrequent office visits by using digital tools for follow-up. A timely digital check-in can identify the problem much earlier. These seemingly small interventions can matter because they allow clinicians to address issues while they are still manageable.
Galileo’s team-based approach allows urgent care, primary care, and specialty care to operate within the same broader care ecosystem. The goal is to maintain continuity and manage conditions longitudinally. For employers, this creates a connection between clinical quality and financial outcomes: better-targeted care may help reduce unnecessary downstream utilization while supporting healthier employees.
Scaling what works
The final question discussed during the webinar was perhaps the most important for employers: What evidence demonstrates that a preventive care strategy is producing value? The first step is understanding engagement. Are employees using the solution? The next step is to determine what changes are occurring in the areas the strategy is intended to influence. This can include measures related to healthcare utilization, high-cost claimants, total cost of care, and other cost drivers.
Establishing a starting point and measuring progress over time can help employers understand whether an investment is delivering sustained value.
From a clinical perspective, the patient experience matters because employees who have positive experiences are more likely to continue engaging with their care. Feedback from patients and clinicians can help identify opportunities to improve that experience.
At the same time, clinical quality measures can provide more specific evidence of whether care is working. Because Galileo operates digitally, the organization can examine clinical data and track outcomes across populations as well as individual patients.
This combination of patient experience, engagement, clinical quality, utilization, and financial performance creates a broader picture of whether preventive care is accomplishing its intended purpose.
Get in touch with Galileo today and move from reactive to proactive Care!
Galileo’s model combines digital access with clinical expertise, relationship-building, behavioural health considerations, and longitudinal care management. Done strategically, preventive care can become an important part of an organization’s broader healthcare and financial strategy. The key is connecting the dots between clinical impact and financial value.
When employers understand which preventive interventions matter most, how healthcare leaders evaluate them, and how financial leaders assess their return, they can make smarter decisions about where to invest and how to scale those investments.
For more information, contact:
Galileo: Get in Touch contact – contactus@galileo.io
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