Seeking Recognition as a Great Place to Work

Arlene Pietranton, Lisa Cole and I with Ron Friedman
at Washingtonian's Great Place to Work Event 10/22/15

Building your brand as an employer of choice goes a long way toward attracting talent. Seeking external recognition through an award program is an effective strategy for building your brand. Awards serve as external validation to potential candidates and some come with loads of free publicity. We don't count the resumes we receive, but companies that do report a 30% spike in the number of applicants they receive after being named to one of Fortune Magazine's lists. 

Once we attract these talented individuals, they stay. Our average tenure is 9.3 years at ASHA and our turnover runs half of the average in the DC metro area. Being deemed a great place to work enhances the pride we all feel in working at ASHA and that carries over to some degree to how our members feel about their professional organization. It enhances our sense of community.

Specialty Drug Management

Last week, I attended an excellent MidAtlantic Business Group on Health Meeting on Specialty Drugs. I suspect most benefit plan managers have been really paying attention to drug costs since the release of the new Hepatitis C medication that cost $84,000 per treatment. That led to fretting over the cost of the new PCSK9 treatment for high cholesterol -- $14,000 a year (compared to $600 for generic statins.) Then, we hear about a former hedge fund manager with more brains than ethics who bought up rights to an old drug and raised the price from $13.50 a tablet to $750 a tablet overnight. (If you missed that story, see the links below.) No surprise, that this was the best attended MidAtlantic Business Group on Health meeting I've seen.