County looking into employee health care clinic that could save money

Knox County is looking into opening a chronic care clinic for its employees, a move officials say will lead to a more healthy and productive workforce and save the taxpayers money on insurance coverage.

Officials still want to talk more about the plan, but the county could begin the bidding process within the next month or so, and have the operation up and running by the end of the year. Officials say they want the center to offer "motivational face-to-face coaching," workers' compensation health services and lab screenings, among other services.

The clinic, which would include an on-site medication program, would be available to roughly 4,700 employees, spouses and their children. The plan would be to build a center or open one at an existing site and then have a third-party provide the services.

You can read the entire story and catch our television report right here.

Audit tattletale line quiet lately

Remember the ol' tattletale line? Yeah. Didn't think so. Apparently a lot of people forgot. What was once a place to regularly leave late night drunken messages or rat screw your work buddy is pretty much dead. Either that or the county is just so full of goodness that nothing is wrong.

Anyhoo, during today's county audit committee meeting, the panel's chairman, Joe Carcello, said that in the past eight weeks, the hotline has received two reports. He said both are being investigated and – according to Mark Jones (who was out today) – there also is “no urgent need to close any open or active reports.”

All this means we probably won't know jack for a long time.

County to merge HR, risk management

Next Monday – with Knox County HR Director Frances Fogerson retiring – the county will combine its human resource and risk management departments. Deputy Veteran Services Officer Colonel Richard Julian will take over as HR manager and risk management director Mark Jones will oversee the whole shebang.

According to a county spin release sent out by the woefully underpaid Big “Michael Sexy” Grider (if you compare his coin to that of his counterparts in the city):

Jones has nearly 17 years of management experiences in Knox County alone, and he holds degrees in law, business and public health. His qualifications make him uniquely suited to head a combined HR-Risk Management department.

Col. Julian retired from the U.S. Military in 1998 after serving more than 30 years as a human resource professional, first as a Military Personnel Specialist. He later spent 17 years as a Military Personnel Officer and Human Resource Director with the 134th Air Refueling Wing.

Come back later for an interview with Fogerson. We'll run part of it in tomorrow's News Sentinel, but I'll post all of it here. It's a good read.

County hot line good thing, needs work

I’ll have a story in tomorrow’s paper about the county’s audit hot line, which I affectionately call the tattletale line.

I’ve posted about this thing before. No clicking right smack here cause I’m too lazy to look for the initial posts. Anyhoo, the focus of the story is mostly on some of the silliness and the potential for abuse that can come out of these things.

Now, granted it’s tough to tell what’s frivolous and what’s not. Especially with Knox County’s colorful political history. But, there is potential for abuse.

For instance: Say candidate “A” is running against an incumbent. “A” gets some of his buddies to call the line a few hundred times. Every call generates a report. Say the callers claim that the incumbent has stolen a bunch of crap. Or has some illegal sexual tastes. Or whatever.

Yeah, sure, county officials might not find anything. But once the investigations are done, all that information is public record. There is nothing stopping the candidate from releasing a mailer a week before the election that says: “(Insert name here) has been the subject of more than 300 tips, linking him to (insert whatever BS accusation here).”

And yeah, that will happen. Here.

So, the issue is going to get discussed. Again, I write about this tomorrow.

What I didn’t get to in the story, however, is that there is some good that has come out of these reports. Mark Jones, the county’s director of risk management, has been charged with going through them, referring them here and there and wherever. I’ve seen them. And although a lot of them have nothing to do with fraud or wasteful spending (the real reason the state asked counties to create these things), he has referred the reports to the proper departments. And from all indications the issues were corrected.

In addition, there could very well be some minor troublesome reports that officials substantiate. Initially, Jones was asked to go through the complaints and refer them to the proper official. The audit committee recently expanded his scope and now he’s checking to see what’s happened with some of them. So, we’ll know more soon.

(All too often, folks - myself included - lose track of some of the good that gets done and we forget to mention it. Believe it or not, most county employees do work. But I digress.)

In the meantime, I’m going to call the audit line and make up some stuff.

Cause I’m mature that way.