Wellness

How three employers are making employee health a priority and seeing the results in their bottom line.

Mercy Medical Center fine-tunes its wellness program with small, incremental changes and boosts participation.

Wellness progress is at a standstill, even as a flow of new products continue to enter the market.

A primary reason for same-sex couples to amend their returns may be if an individual received employer-provided health coverage for a spouse.

Less than half of those surveyed think there is a clear link between their performance and pay, or that high-performing employees are properly rewarded.

Faculty and staff are protesting the program as an invasion of their privacy. What they should be protesting is the university’s wasting money on health risk appraisals, which have never been shown to reduce costs.

Dianne Howard, director of risk and benefits management for Florida’s Palm Beach County school district, takes EBN’s 2013 Benny Award for Benefits Leadership in Health Care.

In the first two years of the program, 82% of the employees of the Minnetonka, Minn.-based insurer covered by the incentive program earned rewards toward reducing their premiums.

Devi Shetty is obsessed with making heart surgery affordable for millions of Indians. On his office desk are photographs of two of his heroes: Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi.

Population health management addresses societal factors that contribute to employee decisions.

Guest blogger Linda Riddell reviews the book Cracking Health Costs.

The debate over whether wellness programs “work” is becoming increasingly heated. While many question the validity of research showing wellness programs reduce health care costs, others swear by their wellness provider.

Among employees at the American Heart Association, 75% of those who created an account on Hotseat are active users and they’re taking, on average, five short activity breaks per day.

In the U.S., 70% of the blood supply comes from repeat donors, who can put themselves at risk.

Along with tying your shoes and naming your colors, you learned to count in preschool. So, how hard can it be to count things in health data? It’s not hard, but your preschool strategies won’t give you the right answer.

Already topping $20 billion a year, UnitedHealthcare predicts its contract reimbursements to hospitals, physicians and ancillary care providers linked to accountable care will hit $50 billion by 2017.

Guest blogger Linda K. Riddell reviews Cracking Health Costs by Tom Emerick and Al Lewis.

The U.S. government is set to decide this month whether federal health insurance should cover the cost of a $3,000 test that for the first time accurately identifies the signature brain plaques of Alzheimer’s disease.

Wellness study shows little progress, but HHS endorses wellness plans with final ACA rules.

“Our results support the ancient proverb: ‘Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper,”’ says Hana Kahleova, a researcher at the Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine in Prague, Czech Republic.