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A smarter strategy for managing long-term healthcare costs
Preventive care is one of the most effective ways to reduce avoidable health expenses—but getting employees to engage with it is a major challenge for most employers. Missed screenings, delayed vaccinations, and lack of early intervention can all lead to higher long-term costs and worse health outcomes.
A top biotech company partnered with Cleo to support their employee caregivers, and encourage preventative care in the context of being your best self for your loved ones.
The result? Cleo users were 40% more likely to be compliant with preventive care. That proactive engagement is saving this company money in the form of fewer claims, reduced absenteeism, and lower risk of costly medical interventions.
The high cost of missed preventative care
As a global biotech leader, this company understands the importance of investing in both innovation and employee wellbeing. Yet even with robust health benefits, many employees and their families were still not engaging in essential preventive care.
Delayed care doesn’t just lead to higher costs for the employee—it creates financial risk for the employer too, in the form of:
- Avoidable ER visits
- More complex care needs later
- Chronic condition escalation
- Increased absenteeism, including longer-term leaves of absence
The reality is common across industries:
- Skipped screenings, annual exams, blood work, and immunizations can lead to expensive complications
- Many employees don’t take action until a health issue becomes severe—at which point it no longer qualifies as preventative care, and therefore becomes more costly by definition
- Benefits teams struggle to drive proactive engagement without personalized outreach connected to an issue employees do prioritize
According to the CDC, every $1 spent on preventive care can save employers up to $3.60 in healthcare costs.
What this company needed was a personalized, proactive way to drive preventive care at scale—especially among employees juggling caregiving responsibilities, who often put themselves and their own health last.
Personalized guidance, timely nudges, and behavior change
The biotech leader partnered with Cleo to embed preventive care support into the daily lives of its caregiving employees. Through Cleo, members receive proactive reminders, coaching, and guidance that help them find ways to prioritize their own health while caring for others.
Here’s how Cleo drove results:
- Data-driven nudges: Cleo uses life-stage insights to deliver tailored reminders about age- and gender-appropriate screenings, vaccinations, and wellness visits.
- 1:1 support: Members work directly with their Cleo Guide or Coach to understand and schedule preventive care—especially helpful for those navigating caregiving and busy family schedules.
- Whole-family approach: Cleo supports both the employee and their dependents, ensuring the entire household stays on track with well-child visits, immunizations, and early health interventions.
- Trust and engagement: Members feel more supported and less judged—making them more likely to act.
- Benefits referral: Where members need additional care outside of Cleo, Cleo Guides and the Cleo in-app benefits hub warmly refer members to the most relevant benefits for them, such as their health plan or therapy benefits.
Cleo doesn’t just recommend this preventative care—it helps people find the right providers, coaches them on how to ask the right questions and request information, and how to follow through so that they understand the results. By making preventive care easy, relevant, and human, Cleo closed critical gaps in this company’s healthcare strategy.
Better engagement. Lower risk. Real savings.
The impact was amazingly clear:
- Cleo utilizers were 40% more likely to stay compliant with preventive care compared to the general employee population (84% vs. 60%).
- Cleo utilizers were 55.6% more likely to use the company’s mental health benefit, thanks to Cleo’s benefits referral engine, compared to the general employee population. (38% vs. 9%).
The most engaged Cleo members were those who were enrolled in Healthy Childhood & Adolescence, Pregnancy and Baby, Trying to Conceive, Mental Health, and Chronic Conditions — all representing life stages that typically come with significant preventative care access issues as well as higher healthcare costs.
This higher engagement led to downstream savings:
- Accurate identification of higher risk employees up front: The company found that those employees that Cleo had initially identified as higher risk through the Family Health Index had, indeed, had higher medical costs than other employees (approximately $1,000 vs. $600 PMPM).
- Reduced unnecessary ER visits: Studies show preventive care reduces ER visits by up to 18%. The biotech company’s Cleo population mirrored that trend.
- Lower per-member healthcare costs: According to the CDC, every $1 spent on preventive care can save employers up to $3.60 in healthcare costs. Cleo’s proactive outreach made that return a reality.
- Fewer complications from chronic conditions: Early detection led to more manageable treatment plans—avoiding costly escalation.
- Less time off work: Parents and caregivers avoided disruptions by staying on top of well-visits, screenings, and immunizations.
By embedding preventive care into daily life, Cleo helped this biotech company transform wellness into a real cost-saving strategy.
"What’s so interesting to me in Cleo’s data—not just the FHI data, but what I see in our broader health data—is how caregiving affects overall health management. It's not just about reducing healthcare costs. Caregiving has a real impact on conditions like MSK, obesity, and mental health. So if you’re not accounting for caregiving, you’re missing a major part of the picture when trying to improve healthcare access and outcomes."— HR leader
WHY THIS MATTERS
- Employees who use Cleo are more likely to be compliant with their preventive care than non-Cleo users (84% vs. 60%)
- Employees who skip preventative care are more likely to incur avoidable ER visits, increased absenteeism, chronic condition escalation, and have more complex care issues down the line.
- Cleo transforms delaying self-care into measurable improvement—with clear ROI for employers.
Ready to reduce the health care costs of your workforce?
Support your people. Prove the impact. Let Cleo help you do both.
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