How it all started

In 1997, our firm, along with one of our clients, the City of Asheville, embarked on a quest to test this ’new model’ of healthcare utilizing a format proposed by the UNC School of Pharmacy that utilized pharmacists meeting monthly with high risk patients to train them to manage their condition by providing the education and follow up that is so lacking in our current system. These efforts ultimately received national notoriety and became known as The Asheville Project. In the years since inception, The Asheville Project has been the most studied, documented, peer reviewed, and published, disease management program in the country, and has now been implemented across the entire United States.

This began our process of assisting employees in becoming knowledgeable regarding their chronic health conditions. Today, we leverage in-house medical staff to conduct individual monthly meetings with all high risk members of our clients. The financial impact to benefit plan costs has been incredible, allowing clients to maintain higher level benefits at lower costs and at the same time most employers are reducing benefits and raising employee contribution. More importantly, and the best part of being a part of this for many years now, the lives of a great many folks in the Carolinas have been changed for the better.