Wellness

With the impact of health care reform still evolving, employers are taking a fresh look at their strategies for keeping employees healthy and productive.

With specialty drugs expected to reach as much as half of total drug expenditures within the next few years, pharmacy benefit manager CVS Caremark has launched a new program designed to make the process of filling specialty medication prescriptions easier for plan members.

To effectively address the reality of the widespread implications of obesity, employers must think beyond wellness programs. They must apply a wide-angle lens to employee health, wellness and even risk.

Benefits managers struggle to measure the real returns on wellness initiatives; achieving the goals of cost savings, cost avoidance and employee engagement requires a well-orchestrated plan. But it's not an impossible task.

If your wellness program consists of a health risk assessment and nothing else, you may be missing the bigger picture. While the tools can yield important information, they may ignore broader factors in employees’ lives that are influencing the unhealthy behavior.

Final regulations implementing the ACA’s nondiscrimination rules for wellness programs became effective in January, but many employers are still unclear about how the regulations have changed. The changes are subtle, but noncompliance can carry heavy penalties.

Workplace stress is a worldwide issue, with new data indicating stressed-out employees are a contributing factor to the global rise in health care costs.

While certain health and wellness campaigns lend themselves to gender-specific messaging – mammograms or prostate cancer, for example – positioning health and benefits communication to male and female employees differently isn’t commonplace.

Even though more than one-in-four Americans have received treatment or therapy from a mental health professional, few people know that health insurers are required to provide coverage for mental health, behavioral health and substance-use disorders that is comparable to coverage for physical health.

Increasingly, organizations are recognizing that employees don’t leave their financial, child/elder care-giving responsibilities and other worries at home, and are beginning to look at wellness in a broader, more holistic way.

Den Bishop had a vision for a new wellness solution, one that focused on the true cost enemy — disease. That vision became ACAP Health.

What are some of the common factors – all much welcomed signs of improved workplace wellness – that are common to America’s healthiest companies? A marked reduction in smoking, plus measurable reductions in glucose and blood pressure levels emerge as the most consistent hallmarks of a truly healthy workplace.

Commentary: Blogger Jeff Hyman says creating this culture is challenging but he has suggestions you can bring to your clients, or your own work environment.

Employer action on the patient safety issue could include crafting health benefit plans that reward safety and penalize non-compliance, urging hospital boards to make safety a priority and distributing patient safety literature.

A lesser known fact about outcome-based wellness programs can help advisers bring their clients’ programs into HIPAA compliance.

Two plan sponsors, the Government Employees Health Association and Orlando Health, share their approaches to weight loss and engaging employees in sustained behavior change.

A new app has hit the streets of New York, looking to maximize the gym reimbursements that are available but underutilized on many insurance plans.

Though mobile health apps have the potential for greater patient engagement, researchers found only two major methods of engagement in their sample population of apps.

There’s a glimmer of good news for employer-sponsored healthcare programs. Near-site and on-site clinics offering primary care, often referred to as “employee health centers,” are bringing overall plan-cost reductions along with measurable member-health improvements

Commentary: EBA blogger Trisha Zulic says the first step in ensuring wellness plans are effective is to deliver information the way adults actually seek it these days.