5 goals in UnitedHealth’s sustainability report

UnitedHealth Group’s’s 2020 Sustainability Report outlines what the healthcare giant has accomplished for its members and goals it hopes to achieve in the near future.

Here are some highlights:

• Providing annual preventive care services to 85% of its members by 2030.
• Lowering its cost of care and prescription drugs. UnitedHealth said it would expand drug discounts and touted an tool by OptumRx, one of the company’s subsidiaries, as a way to inform doctors about the cost of the drugs they prescribe.
• Delivering 55% of outpatient surgeries and radiology services at high-quality, cost-efficient sites of care by 2030.
• Closing 600 million gaps in its care by 2025 by ensuring providers have access to data about the healthcare needs of their patient populations, said Dr. Margaret Wilson, executive vice president and associate chief medical officer at UnitedHealth Group.
• UnitedHealth also pledged to focus on diversity and environmental sustainability but did not share goals in these two areas.

Over the past decade, UnitedHealth said it has spent around $3.5 billion on diverse suppliers, and in 2020 this led to $1.1 billion in revenue earned by diverse businesses, 8,200 jobs supported and $443 million in employee wages.

UnitedHealth said environmental health is “a key part of what makes the communities in which we live and work sustainable, viable and healthy.” In 2020, UnitedHealth only reduced its energy consumption by 1.6%, compared to 2.9% in 2019.

According to the report, in 2020 the company earned $257.1 billion in total revenue, served 142 million individuals and enrolled 600,000 members in its new Virtual Primary Care Plan.

UnitedHealthcare was recently criticized for its announcement of a policy allowing the insurer to retroactively deny patients’ non-emergent emergency care claims as a way to save money, and it has since delayed the policy’s implementation.