What if you could have a wellness program that engages employees, improves health and saves money?
This is virtually impossible with wellness models based upon mythology. Myths like all plans should have disease management, or everyone needs to work on heart disease prevention.
How to get past the noise and on to effective interventions? Look closely at your own group its people, its illnesses, and its work environment.
People
Unengaging wellness programs are designed for that average employer group and use off-the-shelf answers. For example, you might learn from looking at claims data that your plan has paid for a few heart attacks in the past year. The wellness auto-response to heart disease is to promote exercise.
For a high-school educated workforce, exercise promotion will fall on deaf ears. To have a big impact on heart disease for this group, you could instead work on making sure everyone feels he is
Illnesses
Beware of anything that follows the phrase everyone knows. As in everyone knows that chronic disease eats up most of our health costs. This might be true for us as a country, and perhaps even for some employers. An employer who keeps people three to five years will not have chronic disease as a cost driver. Instead, such an employer should focus on short-term events pregnancies and accidents, for example.
Close examination of claims data can show you new opportunities. You might find that smoking is a small health hazard compared to your groups boating and skiing accidents. Offer an incentive to attend water safety training, or give away ski helmets and see your low-engagement problems disappear.
Work environment
You have an unfettered opportunity to control the environment where your people spend eight, 10, or 12 hours a day. There are dozens of small changes that you can make, well beyond serving bagels instead of donuts at meetings.
For example, studies show that people who do not take time off from work are more likely to have coronary heart disease and to die younger. One employer allowed people to cash out their paid time off right before Christmas every year. It encouraged people to work without a break, promoting burnout.
In short, successful wellness programs are based upon the real people, their actual illnesses, and the day-to-day work environment. By directly responding to the real issues -- which are not necessarily obvious or the same as what everyone knows -- wellness programs can save money.
Linda K. Riddell is a principal at Health Economy, LLC. She can be reached at LRiddell@HealthEconomy.net.
