To arrest rising health-care costs, a growing
number of employers are expanding workplace
"wellness" initiatives. Providing
workers with tools and incentives to improve
their health, the thinking goes, will reduce
medical-care costs and boost worker productivity.
Experts say it's a
trend that bodes well for employees who are
motivated to lose weight, quit smoking, manage
a chronic condition or just stay fit.
"Pretty clearly, employers have realized
that if they're going to manage benefit costs
and manage work loss, they need to get at
the underlying health drivers of that -- employee
health -- and get at the root causes of health-care
utilization and health-care expenditures,"
said Bruce Kelley, practice leader for data
services in the Minneapolis office of Watson
Wyatt Worldwide, a human resources consulting
firm.
According to Kelley, employers have been
investing much more heavily in wellness services
in the last few years. "I've been consulting
in this area for 20 years," he noted,
"and I've never seen as much activity
among employers as I've seen just in the last
few years."
Wellness is a broad term that describes the
panoply of health-management services that
companies offer, from onsite fitness centers
and smoking-cessation classes to health-risk
appraisals and disease-management programs.
Survey data show that more large employers
are offering programs to improve employee
health and productivity. Seventy-five percent
offered a "health promotion" program
in 2005 or 2006, up from 56 percent in 2003,
according to survey results released last
December by Watson Wyatt and the National
Business Group on Health.
Nearly three out of four employers (72 percent)
are sponsoring health-risk appraisals to measure
individual employees' health risks and behaviors.
And 40 percent are engaging "personal
health coaches," health professionals
who can help, say, an employee with diabetes
manage their diet, exercise and drug regimens.
At the same time, corporate America and public
health leaders are grappling to understand
which particular interventions or combinations
of programs and incentives yield the greatest
return on investment.
"There has not been a tremendous amount
of high quality research in this area,"
said Doug Evans, director of the Center for
Health Promotion Research at RTI International,
a nonprofit research institute based in Research
Triangle Park, N.C.
But there are a number of efforts under way
to learn what works. The U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, for one, is
sponsoring a series of studies to evaluate
worksite efforts to prevent and control obesity.
In one study, published in the September/October
2005 issue of the American Journal of Health
Promotion, CDC
and RTI researchers found that obesity boosts
employers' costs, including medical expenditures
and absenteeism, by $460 to $2,500 per obese
employee per year. They estimated that the
cost of obesity at a firm with 1,000 employees
is about $285,000 per year.
In March, the National Business Group on
Health issued 10 recommendations for promoting
prevention in the workplace. Overall, it concluded
that without the support of top-level management,
companies cannot convey "the importance
to employees of caring for themselves."
Some employers are using incentives to get
workers on the wellness bandwagon. You might
qualify for a lower health insurance premium,
say, if you stop smoking, or you could earn
a $25 gift certificate for completing a health-risk
appraisal.
The use of incentives will continue, Evans
predicted. However, he believes employers
must do a better job of promoting the benefits
of health, much like anti-tobacco advocates
did by portraying a non-smoking lifestyle
as cool, hip and fun.
"Maybe that kind of technique can be
effective in obesity," he offered. "Can
you make it cool to be healthy weight and
not to be fat?"
