Former Goldman Sachs mergers & acquisitions expert, Ingolv Urnes, left the city with the mission of 'merging' occupational health and technology. Three years ago he founded Active Health Partners, and pioneered the concept of outsourced management of employee absence. The business is now one of UK's fastest growing companies.
Ingolv Urnes, a native Norwegian, spent a decade in investment banking with Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt, New York and London, working with health and service companies. During this time he became increasingly aware of the failure of traditional approaches to managing absence in the workplace - a problem costing businesses millions of pounds every year. These costs are only increasing given the steep increase in health-related litigation.
Traditional approaches, according to Urnes, "have been failing due to lack of health support for employees, inconsistent processes and a total lack of actionable management information". So with the aid of private investors, Urnes founded Active Health Partners (AHP) to provide a service based on a nurse call-centre for recording of absence from 'Day 1', combined with a sophisticated IT infrastructure providing 21st century management information to his clients.
"How can you have discussions about stress at work without actually being able to quantify the problem?" says Urnes. He believes that he is helping HR leaders become more effective at board and CEO level. "In the past, HR largely had to rely on anecdotes - we can now give them the data to measure what is actually going on."
AHP launched with its first client in late 2003. One of AHPs' first clients was Brakes, the UK's leading supplier of food to the catering industry. Following a successful pilot study covering 1,200 employees, where AHP helped reduce absence by 30%, Brakes decided to roll-out the service to all its 6,000 employees. Following initial successes, AHP now has a broad client base spanning both the private and public sectors, including organisations such as Sirva/Pickfords, Kingston Communications, City of York Council and Worcester NHS Trust.
Urnes, an avid kick-boxer with a fiercely competitive streak, is convinced that "in 3 to 5 years most large organizations will focus on their core business and use Active Health Partners to provide Absence Management from 'Day 1'. In the process we will re-define the provision of occupational health and kick out some of the traditional providers."
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