2025 GPBCH Employer Symposia Set to Address Cardiovascular, MSK Challenges

The upcoming Greater Philadelphia Business Coalition on Health (GPBCH) Employer Symposia: The Heart & Other Muscles to aims to provide practical, actionable insights for managing the challenges brought about by cardiovascular and musculoskeletal (MSK) disease. This meeting, Tom Belmont, CAP, CLU, ChFC, RHU, REBC, president and CEO, GPBCH, noted, is a great networking opportunity for employers looking to deepen their understanding of the impacts these conditions have on presenteeism, absenteeism, and health care plans.

Sessions will explore both medical and workplace perspectives, paying mind to how employers and businesses can take on an active role in the prevention of cardiac disease, support those grappling with MSK conditions, promote workplace wellness, and balance costs alongside health benefits.

This transcript has been lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

What would you say are the goals of this year’s GPBCH Employer Symposia: The Heart & Other Muscles, and how do you foresee this meeting building off years prior?

So we have done this routinely for years to really bring to the forefront for our members key areas of clinical need. And you know, in the past, we worked with cancer, mental health, to really take a deep dive on those types of issues for employer members. And what we hope out of the sessions happens, and this year with cardiovascular and MSK, is that they come away with some insights. And to do that, we typically will set up the session so that they get educated on the landscape. What's the current landscape, what's going on at this point in the specific area this year, cardiovascular and MSK, and what are some things that are happening that are innovative at this point? Probably the highlight of the sessions is usually when employers get up there and start talking about what they've done, how they've innovated, how they've chased after a specific area, and what's working. And I think people learn as much from employers who say what's not working. And that's one of the hallmarks of this coalition is employers really feel in a good spot and a safe spot to be able to share the good, the bad and the ugly, so we can all learn together and grow and get better together.

Can you speak to the important themes of this year’s event and their impact on employers?

I think that if you look at cardiovascular and MSK, I'll take them separately, there is a theme across them. There are these issues that employers are dealing with that are impacting on presenteeism, absenteeism and ultimately claims. But if you take them separately, cardiovascular is number 1, number 2, number 3 on everybody's list of top diagnoses from a cost perspective, impact, when you're looking at death within the population. There's different issues with cardiovascular.

Then, if you go over to MSK, people dealing with pain, they're not going to be as productive, they're not going to be as effective as work. They're not going to be there, and they're going to have chronic issues for their lifetime. What I think is unique about both areas is they are both uniquely treatable, and there are solutions out there to help either mitigate in total, or help, you know, really mitigate the impact of that disease on an individual for some period of time.

These events provide major networking opportunities. In this respect, what are some of the bigger takeaways you hope attendees have after the event concludes?

I think that is usually the most difficult task of any of these events, is getting the employers and all the attendees to sit back down after they start networking, because they do enjoy the conversation and the sharing of information. I think what we want from all of our events individuals to take away is what are 1, 2, 3 innovative ideas that I can take back to my team, to my employer, to my plan, that I can implement somewhere in the future, or will help make something I've implemented already better.

I am incredibly excited about the speakers that we have this year that are coming from, on the cardiovascular side, the state of Delaware who are going to talk about the community impact of cardiovascular health. We have people come from the Heart Association. You're going to talk about some of the unique programs they're putting together based on all of their learnings that will help employers. And we have an employer and health plan sitting down together talking about how they're working to bring innovative solutions. One of our employers is actually using a physician out in Boulder, where they're sending their members out to Boulder, Colorado, to have specific tests done and get innovative procedures done. We've got some really interesting speakers that I think present a wide gamut of opportunities for the members to learn.