The Health Transformation Alliance (HTA) Recognizes Members Linde and Wayne Farms for Excellence in Employee Healthcare in 2021

WESTMONT, N.J., Feb. 2, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Health Transformation Alliance (HTA), a cooperative of leading employers across the nation united in the common cause to improve healthcare quality and affordability for employees and their families, today announced its first annual Member awards for 2021. The U.S. operation of Linde (NYSE: LIN) (FWB: LIN), a leading global industrial gas and engineering company, was named Member of the Year. Wayne Farms LLC, the seventh largest vertically integrated poultry producer in the U.S., was named Innovator of the Year.

"By any measure, 2021 was a challenging year for U.S. employers, especially around employee health and well-being," said Rob Andrews, CEO of the HTA. "Despite the challenges of a global pandemic, supply and labor shortages, and a broken healthcare system, all of our Members made progress on their employee healthcare initiatives. Linde and Wayne Farms stand out for their excellence and innovation in critical areas: expanding access to quality healthcare while reducing costs for employees and themselves. These are extraordinary accomplishments in extraordinary times."

Member of the Year Linde

Linde was recognized for simultaneously deploying seven clinical vendor point solutions and implementing daily data feeds from both its carrier and a pharmacy benefit manager—one of the first companies in the U.S. to have full control of its pharmacy and medical data and daily access to it. The vendor solutions extended or improved employee healthcare coverage in key areas such as behavioral health, cancer care support, maternity and fertility care, and access to no-cost expert second opinions and centers of excellence for specific surgical procedures. Having daily access to its pharmacy and medical data enables the company to track all aspects of benefits and take corrective action quickly to control costs. Remarkably, the company has not had a per-member per-month pharmacy cost increase from 2014 to 2020.

Linde was also recognized for its direct contributions to the HTA, including initiating the HTA's first third-party administrator (TPA) employer group and becoming its inaugural member. The group brings together progressive HTA members that have implemented TPAs to share best practices.

"The HTA plays a key role in helping large, self-insured employers come together to achieve our shared employee healthcare goals by combining resources and through collective action," said Kristen Putnam, Director, Global Benefits of Linde. "Participating in HTA initiatives and programs is important to Linde because we believe we can achieve more by working with other progressive companies than we can on our own. We are grateful to the HTA and fellow Members for the opportunity to work together on these pressing problems."

Innovator of the Year Wayne Farms

Wayne Farms was one of the first 20 members of the HTA when it launched in 2016. Among the company's recent accomplishments were implementing a specialty drug carve-out with pharmacy and medical benefits and engaging an independent clinical firm to train and standardize the performance of the company's onsite clinics. Wayne Farms also implemented a dual-layer fraud/waste/abuse review on every claim and pioneered the separation of health plan administration from health plan financial transactions through use of an independent data server. These actions enabled the company to roll back its overall healthcare costs in 2021 to 2018 levels—without passing along a single dollar of additional costs in specific areas to employees.

Wayne Farms was also recognized for its direct contributions to the HTA, most notably for helping to develop and set data standards for HTA vendors.

"As a charter member of the HTA, we value the organization's focus on gathering valuable data and developing solutions members can adopt to provide healthcare benefits that meet the needs of our employees," said David Malfitano, CHRO of Wayne Farms. "Further, the data provided by our fellow member companies, and transformed into unbiased insights by the HTA, gives even more confidence to take the bold steps necessary to aggressively manage costs without sacrificing quality. We all share the same goal: to improve the health and well-being of our most important asset, our people."

About Linde
Linde is a leading global industrial gases and engineering company with 2020 sales of $27 billion (€24 billion). We live our mission of making our world more productive every day by providing high-quality solutions, technologies and services which are making our customers more successful and helping to sustain and protect our planet.

The company serves a variety of end markets including chemicals & energy, food & beverage, electronics, healthcare, manufacturing, metals and mining. Linde's industrial gases are used in countless applications, from life-saving oxygen for hospitals to high-purity & specialty gases for electronics manufacturing, hydrogen for clean fuels and much more. Linde also delivers state-of-the-art gas processing solutions to support customer expansion, efficiency improvements and emissions reductions.

For more information about the company and its products and services, please visit www.linde.com

About Wayne Farms LLC
Wayne Farms LLC is the seventh-largest vertically integrated poultry producer in the U.S. with annual sales exceeding $2 billion. A subsidiary of Continental Grain Company, Wayne Farms owns and operates 10 fresh and further-processed facilities throughout the Southeast, produces more than 2.6 billion pounds of poultry products each year, and employs more than 7,000 individuals. Producing products under the brand names of WAYNE FARMS® fresh and prepared chicken; PLATINUM HARVEST® premium fresh chicken; CHEF'S CRAFT® gourmet chicken; and NAKED TRUTH® premium chicken, Wayne Farms has a well-known history of delivering exceptional poultry products to some of the largest industrial, institutional, and foodservice companies across America. For more information visit our website at www.waynefarms.com

About Health Transformation Alliance
The Health Transformation Alliance (HTA) is a cooperative of 60 of America's leading employers that have come together to fix our broken healthcare system. With responsibility for more than 4 million lives in the United States and a collective annual health care spend of $27 billion, the member companies of the HTA have combined their resources, knowledge, and experience to transform the way healthcare is delivered. To that end, the HTA has developed value-driven solutions in data and analytics, pharmacy, medical and consumer engagement specifically designed to improve patient care and economic value.

SOURCE Health Transformation Alliance