RED CARPET TREATMENT
Never mind the parking spot and the bonus.
Top execs now number gold-standard health checkups among their perks

By Astrid Van Den Broek

Illustration by Greg White

IMAGINE A PLACE where rather than waiting for days to get four minutes of face time with your physician, you are ushered in right away for a three-hour tête-à-tête with various health professionals. Imagine a place where, instead of rifling through Reader’s Digest and old issues of Maclean’s while you wait, you are offered 10-minute shoulder massages and orange juice. Or a place where, instead of just talking about that odd, recurring pain in your knee, you sit and chat with health professionals who ask questions about your entire body and your lifestyle. How are you eating? Are you logging enough hours of sleep at night? How’s your marriage? Feeling blue at all?

Such places do exist and, in fact, are swinging their doors wide open to executives from across the country. At a time when it looks like we have an ailing health-care system, private health companies are offering the ultimate perk: an in-depth, one-stop checkup on your health. Many employers are now slipping in a three-to-four-hour annual health examination (or screening) into recruitment and retaining packages for executives. A third-tier health system? Perhaps. But do companies like the idea? You bet.

While traditional executive perks once involved entrance-hugging parking spots, healthy bonuses or much-needed health club memberships, companies today are providing health screenings as an added incentive to join or stay with the firm. “It’s the newest generation of [benefits] ensuring wellness for employees,” notes John Cape, vice-president of sales and business development at Medcan Health Management Inc., whose Toronto office handles more than 50 assessments daily. Big companies used to have a medical doctor on-site. And one of the doctor’s roles evolved into periodic health screenings of the company’s employees. “Executive screens,” explains Cape, “evolved from the traditional corporate doctor’s role and are now taking a front seat in the structuring of corporate benefits and compensation because companies are truly interested in maintaining a healthy workplace.”

Take professional services firm Deloitte & Touche. For years the company has required all of its partners to have annual medicals. It’s not that simple, according to Toronto-based partner Noel Woodsford, who is in charge of health and wellness for Deloitte & Touche’s partners. “The way the provincial guidelines are set, you can’t always insist on a full medical with your family doctor. It’s going to depend on their view of what you need,” he says. “So, there was some employee frustration—on the one hand, our firm requires an annual medical, and on the other, family physicians didn’t want to schedule screening tests.” Faced with this issue, Deloitte & Touche two years ago turned to Medisys Health Group, a Montreal-based company specializing in health-screening services for executives, for a solution. Under the terms of the agreement, Medisys will provide executive health services to approximately 500 partners across Canada.

Woodsford notes that today, while the plan remains voluntary (partners were given the option of staying with their family doctors for physicals), some 40 percent of all partners have taken them up on the company’s offer. “We’re pleased with that percentage and with the benefit of having our partners getting their annual examinations done quickly and having the whole process efficiently managed,” he says.

Those benefits don’t surprise Gerlinde Hermann, president of the Toronto-based Hermann Group and of the Human Resource Professionals Association of Ontario. “Not only are these screenings more thorough, but they [also] tend to include more tests than you would have if you went to your general physician,” says Hermann. “It’s also time-conserving. To have an executive take a half-day to do a whole bunch of tests is a whole lot more practical than if they were going to set up all these tests themselves. And time is money.”

So, what’s exactly involved in these half-day screenings? A general physical wherein height and weight are measured, blood pressure is taken and issues of general wellness are discussed. But executives are also given blood tests, stress tests, a meeting with a nutritionist and a fitness assessment. Tests are also skewed to the age and gender of the executives, so that older males get prostate examinations, and women undergo screening for early detection of breast cancer. Many private clinics boast VIP rooms and limousine service and are open 24/7. And besides being equipped with state-of-the-art technology—CT scanners and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines—and providing access to positron-emission tomography (PET), these clinics also have newer, generally unavailable screening procedures, such as virtual colonoscopies. And at $1,000 to $1,300 per assessment per executive, most companies view the costs as a worthy investment. “These are really preventative medical assessments,” notes Stuart Elman, chief financial officer of Medisys. “It’s an investment in your team.”

That focus on prevention is what piqued the interest of Sharon Mitchell, Toronto-based chief operating officer for Gowling Lafleur Henderson, a legal firm headquartered in Ottawa. She has been taking part in these tests at Medcan Health Management Inc. for the past three years and feels that the half-day involved is worth it. “The environment is very professional and you don’t feel rushed at all. You feel everyone is being very thorough and when you’re at the clinic, you do all the tests there. You don’t have to leave to get your chest X-rayed or go to a lab and get blood work done,” says Mitchell. “And at the end of the visit, they come back and talk to you about what’s been found. I’ve known situations where they’ve diagnosed something serious and because of that, they’ve been able to go and see a doctor for further medical attention.” Mitchell also notes there’s no overlap with the public health-care system. Files are sent to the family doctor involved, so there’s no duplication of tests down the road should follow-up with the GP be required.

But what are the benefits of letting your high-billing partners go for a non-revenue-generating half-day of tests? “Say, a lawyer bills $500 to $700 an hour. If we can invest the time and prevent them from being sick one day a year, clearly we’ve paid back substantially more than the cost of the service,” says Elman. “It’s a good, sensible business practice.”

It also makes good health sense. Private clinic data shows that employee participation in health improvement programs for chronic illnesses such as asthma, diabetes and heart disease had positive long-term results. According to a study done by a U.S. private clinic, those who participated in its diabetes program for three years saw emergency-room visits drop by 27 percent and blood sugar levels decreased by 15 percent.

But while private clinics and surgical facilities have been an accepted part of the health-care system in provinces like Alberta and Quebec, Ontario has been more reticent. This may change, however, and corporations are leading the way. “Realizing that recruitment and retention are increasingly important to their success, companies see screening as a tool to enhance both of those areas,” notes Dr. Sanjeev Sharma, president of WellPoint Health Services, which has an office in Toronto’s Yorkville district.

In response, private clinics are anteing up services. Medisys, which has some 4,000 companies on its roster and more than 10,000 executives as clients, recently introduced a new health-care “concierge” service: Medisys One. This plan, which comes with a price tag of $1,500 a year (in addition to the executive health-care program), provides 24-hour access to a physician. “If you run into health issues the rest of the year, who do you call? We find that most of our clients don’t call their family physicians,” notes Elman. “And most physicians don’t have time and aren’t compensated for being a patient’s advocate, so that’s the role we’re trying to take with this program.”

Medisys has also started women’s executive health centres in Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and Toronto. Designed by female physicians, these centres provide a host of services, from gynecological examinations to evaluating the risk factors for developing osteoporosis, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Other private clinics, like WellPoint, offer family programs at an annual cost of $7,500, which includes acute-care management, dietitians, kinesiologists and expert second opinions.
The interest in executive health care shows no sign of dying out anytime soon. Programs are being extended to spouses and to middle managers or even as part of a flexible pick-and-choose benefits package.

Gerlinde Hermann, president the Human Resource Professionals Association of Ontario, sums it up: “In general, there’s a trend towards taking a healthier look at your employee. If you can keep your employees at work versus [their] taking time off for a number of illnesses, that’s just good business.”