At Beyond the Bottom Line Forum, Answers Led Back to Primary Care
At this year’s spring forum, the conversation kept circling back to the same place. Workforce health strategy, whole-person care, data infrastructure, AI. Every thread led back to one question: do your employees have a real relationship with a primary care physician?
For most workforces, the answer is not consistently yes. And the cost of that gap is measurable. WHA Medical Director Drew Oliveira put a number on it: connecting employees to primary care lowers costs by 20%. Kaiser Permanente Washington CFO John Bry said getting people connected to a primary care physician and to behavioral health “are going to move us much more so than debating what accountable care or value-based care means.” Washington State Health Care Authority Chief Medical Officer Judy Zerzan-Thul named the integration of primary care and behavioral health as the top item on her scorecard.
Ray Fabius of HealthNEXT, who has spent a decade studying companies with flat healthcare costs, frames it in terms of near misses. Primary care catches the signals before they become diagnoses: the high blood sugar before diabetes, the elevated blood pressure before hypertension. He pushed back on the conventional clinical wisdom that a healthy patient can wait five years between visits. “That person should be going back to the office every 90 days for an atta boy, atta girl, keep it up,” he told the forum. The return on keeping well people well, in his research, outpaces almost everything else in a culture-of-health strategy.
Make It Easy to Show Up
The problem isn’t awareness. It’s access. Primary care practices are stretched. For an employee on a factory shift or a compressed schedule, getting to a physician during business hours means taking time off. Boeing’s answer was direct: put the clinic next to the factory. The company placed advanced primary care centers within walking distance of its largest worksites in Everett, Renton, and St. Louis, and staffed them with co-located behavioral health, physical therapy, and lab services. The pitch to employees: save time, save money, get great care. Thirty to 40% of Boeing’s visits through that arrangement are now virtual.
Not every employer can build a clinic. Every employer can remove friction. Amazon One Medical, which partners with Boeing for telehealth, runs 12 offices across the Seattle-Tacoma area and a 24/7 virtual medical team that keeps employees out of urgent care and emergency departments. Scheduling happens through an app. Employees reach a real clinician the same day.
The behavioral health piece is not optional. Boeing’s weight-loss program data showed that employees who accepted mental health support alongside their physical health coaching lost nearly double the weight of those who didn’t. Primary care that integrates behavioral health, rather than referring out, produces better outcomes across the board.
Most health plans make primary care and behavioral health available. Few make them easy. That gap is the employer’s to close. Through co-located clinics, advanced primary care partnerships, or virtual access that actually works, the employers who close it will see it in their data and in their trend.
The action is not complicated. Make primary care the easiest thing your employees can do.
The WHA May Forum was a gathering on May 13, 2026, of Washington’s employers, health plans, and physicians and health systems. Learn more at wahealthalliance.org/health-forum-seattle.