Companies best at managing their healthcare costs scored a coupin 2013.

While the average company in a survey by Towers Watson saw thecost of their health care plans increase by 5.5%, TW's “bestperformers” reported an increase of only 1.6%.

That finding was contained in the pages of the 19th annualTowers Watson/National Business Group on Health Employer Survey onPurchasing Value in Health Care.

The full report won't be available until June, but theconsulting firm offered a sampling of what it learned from the 595employers it gathered data from between November 2013 and January2014. This group's health plans cover 7.8 million employees.

For starters, TW and the NBGH quantified some trends that havebeen previously reported, such as an overall lowering of the healthplan cost hikes in recent years (just a 4.1% average hike in 2013),the fact that most large employers (95%) intend to keep providingemployee health coverage, and increased reliance on cost-shiftingto rein in health bills.

In TW's breakout of “best performers” vs. average performers,the best weren't merely those who took cost into consideration.

“Best performers are more assertive than other employers intaking steps to both improve their health cost trend and helpemployees manage their well-being. The best performers' health costtrend of 1.6% in 2013 was driven by several critical actions,” thereport said.

What might those be?

Here are the five characteristics of best performers cited bythe survey:

1. Design health plans that emphasize high performance.

2. Establish favorable contracts with pharmacy benefit managersand drive members to use generic drugs.

3. Understand and respond to the underlying population healthrisks of their employees.

4. Contract with highly effective partners (health plans,pharmacy benefit managers and providers) and aggressively negotiatefinancial terms with a growing focus on value-basedarrangements.

5. Establish coverage tiers.