Executive Summary

The integrated approach to care the Town of Babylon chooses for its employees provides quicker and more efficient access to primary care physicians via phone, video, and chat options and on-site clinics. It also includes integrated diet, mental health counseling, and an on-call healthcare concierge to help employees easily navigate and utilize plan benefits.

“It wasn’t uncommon for folks to come in to work when they weren’t feeling great or even had the flu, and at the time you didn’t worry too much and just kind of hoped for the best… Realizing we needed to move to the next level with healthcare services was one of the reasons I pushed hard for use to enter into a longer-term agreement with Radish.”

— Kevin Bonner
Director of Communications
Town of Babylon

The Challenge

The Town of Babylon is one of ten towns in Suffolk County, New York. It first needed help managing and containing employee infections during the pandemic. After the pandemic, it sought assistance in enhancing the depth and breadth of its employee healthcare offerings.

The Solution

Radish Health.

The Results

Radish was able to provide immediate contact tracing and screening options to help the town during the pandemic. Radish then began onsite clinics offering vaccines, flu shots, wellness checks, and bloodwork. Enthusiastic employees were soon opting to have all their healthcare needs met via the Radish telehealth plan, which offered comprehensive services and unrivaled speed.

Town of Babylon is one of ten towns in Suffolk County, New York. The town has a staff of roughly 600 full-time employees, and an additional 200 part-time and contract staff.

Radish Health is a healthcare innovator that offers an integrated, comprehensive health plan combining primary care physician, diet counseling, and mental health. The Town of Babylon introduced Radish Health as a benefit offering during the pandemic, when the town had a pressing need to contain Covid and protect employees from its spread.

Radish Health offered such quick, thorough, and helpful assistance during that period that it became a leading candidate to help the town upgrade and expand its standard healthcare offering to all civil servants and employees as part of its vision to offer more robust, efficient standard care.

“Our first focus in 2020 was on simply finding a robust, easy-to-implement solution for contact tracing and screening,” explains Kevin Bonner, the town’s director of communications.

Radish Health helped the Town of Babylon put that plan together, using aggressive monitoring to help people who were sick find treatment quickly and contain meetings to healthy, screened personnel unlikely to spread disease.

Expanding Healthcare Services After COVID

Radish was built as a platform to offer far more than Covid tracking, and as the nation began to pull out of the pandemic in early 2022, the Town of Babylon was excited to expand its use of Radish services.

“Radish had really built up a fan base here during our dramatic but short period of intense Covid challenges,” says Bonner, “and that helped us realize that whole-person care was something that needed to happen with or without a pandemic. This made it a lot easier for The Town of Babylon to use more Radish health services—especially as we all learned more about the entire breadth of services Radish Health offers and became increasingly ‘wowed’ by that.”

The full Radish platform is a telehealth program that provides each employee concierge-level access to a dedicated, coordinated care team with a doctor, dietitian, and therapist, along with a navigator to help them find additional in-network resources to serve their needs.

Many people at first asked: “What’s the catch? What do I have to pay for this?” and were surprised that there’s no catch at all.”

Kevin Bonner

The Platform

• Improves employee health by connecting staff with accessible, in-network care that serves their various medical needs.
• Saves on healthcare costs as fewer visits to urgent care and ER lower insurance premiums.
• Boosts productivity with less work interruption through virtual appointments that can be set up in minutes and conducted via phone, video, or chat.
• Attracts and retains top talent by providing a unique valuable benefit that supports organizations in recruiting and retaining the talent they need.
• Strengthens medical advisory services for pandemic care, return-to-office plans, and overall ongoing organizational health.
• Provides benefits education as employees’ health insurance questions and concerns are referred directly to Radish’s concierge team.

Healthcare as Differentiator and Competitive Advantage

“Many people at first asked: ‘What’s the catch? What do I have to pay for this?’ and were surprised that there’s no catch at all,” says Bonner. “The town is essentially able to offer Radish services as a perk because of the value it delivers to us.”

Strong benefits, the Town of Babylon found, are an important draw for its employees. That corresponds with a growing national trend: According to a recent Quest Diagnostics 2022 Health at Work Survey, better benefits in general (38%) and better healthcare benefits specifically (36%) were among the top reasons, behind salary, that employees consider changing jobs.

This seems to be especially true when it comes to mental health support, with 66% of companies making changes to better support mental well-being according to NFP’s 2022 U.S. Employer Benefits Survey. In fact, 79% of employees would choose additional benefits over a pay raise, according to a recent Employment Confidence Survey from Glassdoor. 11% of employees at Town of Babylon utilize Radish Health’s mental health services regularly.

A New Paradigm

The pandemic has changed the relationship between employers, staff, and health.

“In most places, work was work, and outside of work your personal health wasn’t particularly connected—and it wasn’t uncommon for folks to come in to work when they weren’t feeling great or even had the flu, and at the time you didn’t worry too much and just kind of hoped for the best,” Bonner explains. “Realizing we needed to move to the next level with healthcare services was one of the reasons I pushed hard for use to enter into a longer-term agreement with Radish.”

“Offering increasingly extensive, personalized, and onsite health options is the new normal for us. The pandemic served as a catalyst for us to move to next level with the sort of health services we offer. Radish is almost now seen as part of the Town of Babylon’s internal team.”

The whole person approach to care the Town of Babylon champions for its employees today is about more than just quicker and more efficient access to primary care physicians. It’s about integrated diet and mental health counseling options and having an on-call network concierge to help employees easily navigate the plan. Overall, Bonner says, the Radish healthcare offerings have been tremendously successful, and employees love it.

“Our older population of civil servants generally has more longstanding relationships with the existing primary care physician they’ve used for years, and so they may have been a bit more reluctant to sign up and engage with Radish at first,” explains Bonner. “But that’s changed over time as they’ve seen not only all the new features and options the plan’s added, but all the stuff Radish is providing us on-site: Not just flu shots, vaccines, and wellness checks, but full-fledged physicals, bloodwork tests, and more.”

As Town of Babylon employees see how quickly and conveniently they can access Radish services, they’re increasingly opting in to the Radish plan— and spreading the enthusiasm.