Moses Hee, MiCare’s Group Chief Executive Officer, stated, “We chose to partner with Alpro Pharmacy to serve our over 10 million members as it enables us to fulfil our vision of making healthcare more affordable and accessible, by helping insurers, corporates, employers, and individuals better manage their healthcare costs despite increasing medical inflation and administration complexity. Taking a holistic perspective, our collaboration does not stop at providing medication; we also actively implement different Corporate Disease Management Programs to help corporates improve health outcomes. Our panel GP clinics are also important partners in achieving our stated vision and with their support we have witnessed optimisation of healthcare services.”

One of the programmes under the CDMP provided by Alpro to MiCare’s corporate members is the Corporate Panel Pharmacy Service, which provides an additional layer of intervention or cross checking by a pharmacist to review the prescriptions from the clinic before dispensing them to the corporate user.

Commenting on the impact of the Corporate Panel Pharmacy Service, Ph. Low Swee Siong, Alpro Pharmacy’s Chief Executive Officer, said, “As pharmacists, we are the guardians of medication, and it is our duty to ensure medication safety. With the involvement of a pharmacist, coupled with innovation and technology, including telemedicine and PILcube for personalised medication packaging, we managed to generate substantial cost-savings for our users.

Alpro is totally aligned with MiCare’s stand on not practising any “fee split” with medical providers. In our strategic partnership with MiCare, there is no unnecessary transactional charges imposed on medical providers. This has resulted in tremendous cost savings to MiCare’s corporate customers, and has definitely made our collaboration with MiCare more meaningful.”

In the past two years, Alpro has also provided its complimentary Corporate Wellness Programme, another initiative of the Corporate Disease Management Program, to more than 15,000 of MiCare’s corporate members through preliminary health screening, virtual health talks and webinars to more than 100,000 employees to reduce productivity losses in the workforce due to health factors.

According to Alpro’s dispensing records, the top three diagnoses amongst the corporate workforce are High Blood Pressure, Dyslipidemia (High Cholesterol) and Diabetes. These and other noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) were estimated to cost RM8.91 billion annually1 from productivity losses due to absenteeism, presenteeism in the workplace, and the premature death of the workingage population in Malaysia.

“Through the various initiatives of the Corporate Wellness Programme, by our healthcare professionals, including Pharmacists, Audiologists, Nutritionists, Dietitians and Physiotherapists, NCDs can be detected early and controlled effectively, which can potentially make significant improvements on workforce productivity losses, evident in our results today,” Ph Low added.