Bay District Schools gets new health care provider

BAY COUNTY, Fla. (WJHG/WECP) - Bay District School employees will soon be getting a new medical provider at their wellness center.

The district has had a wellness center for several years, where they hire a medical provider to come in and provide services. The district’s current medical provider is Marathon Health. Their contract with the district ends on April 1st and now the district is contracting with someone else.

At Tuesday’s school board meeting, the board approved to contract Pancare Health as the wellness center’s new medical provider. CFO Jim Loyed said Pancare already provides a lot of services for the district now. He said they decided to switch to Pancare to see if they can get better participation and possibly expand services for their employees. He adds there are other things Pancare will be able to do that Marathon could not.

“We just think that Pancare has a good presence. They’ve got a lot of employees already in Bay County and so if there’s any kind of shortage in staffing they’ll be able to flex around. They’ve been very flexible with COVID, doing COVID testing and things for the district and so to be able to expand that over into our employees at the wellness center and some of that type stuff, we think will be a better fit,” said Loyed.

Loyed said all of the district’s full-time, benefit-eligible employees will be able to benefit from Pancare services. If you have family on the district’s health insurance, they’ll be able to benefit as well. He adds with the new provider, there should be additional savings with increased usage for their services.

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