Health Populi

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Employee health and productivity -- a growth segment


If employers got their collective hands on Aladdin's lamp, they'd wish for:
  • Increased employee accountability
  • Reduced health risks
  • Tailored health management programs that account for risk
  • Health data and measurement tools that feed into analytics and outcomes measures, and
  • Integrated and well-managed benefits and programs.
These wishes are brought to you by Hewitt Associates' 2008 survey, The Road Ahead: Driving Productivity by Investing in Health.

38% of employers plan to develop strategies for employee health and productivity in the next 1 to 2 years; 21% plan to do so within 3 to 5 years. 1 in 5 (19%) aren't planning for a health and productivity strategy at all.

Some of the key lessons in this survey are that:

All costs are not direct, and employers aren't yet measuring the important indirect costs and benefits yielded by health management programs (such as absenteeism and presenteeism).

Real innovations aren't yet adopted by most employers, such as value-based benefit designs.

On-site programs that offer convenience and "high touch" are highly valued but, again, aren't universally adopted. Instead, 'long distance' programs like telephone-based counseling are, and they're not nearly as satisfactory to employees.

This study was conducted in the Spring of 2008 among 250 employers representing 4.4 million employees.

Health Populi's Hot Points: In this imploding week in financial markets, one looks for safe bets. Here's one: for employers who continue to offer health benefits, a tight focus on productivity is a growth business. If you are Missourian in spirit and can prove the value of services -- whether it's the value of medicines, the ROI on wellness, the outcomes generated by a worksite clinic -- there is a five-year window for nearly 6 in 10 employers to develop an integrated strategy for health and productivity, as the Hewitt survey forecasts. It's all about health risk mitigation and management, tailoring programs to the employee's needs and proclivities, and measuring results from the start.

posted by Jane Sarasohn-Kahn at 6:11 AM

1 Comments:

  • Add to the list of things that employers should promote if they only understood the consequences and thought about it: an organized campaign to provide employee/parents with information that helps them promote healthy behaviors and manage illness.

    Children with illness are not only reasons to stay home, but vectors that can bring that illness into the workplace...

    A UCLA study of parents who participate in Medicaid found that simple measures to promote health literacy and educate parents on common childhood illnesses significantly reduced the use of emergency rooms.

    www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/88171.php

    "Tracking 9,240 Head Start families enrolled in a health literacy program -- and impacting nearly 20,000 children in 35 states -- researchers found that visits to a hospital ER or clinic dropped by 58 percent and 42 percent, respectively, as parents opted to treat their children's fevers, colds and earaches at home. This added up to a potential annual savings to Medicaid of $554 per family in direct costs associated with such visits, or about $5.1 million annually, according to the UCLA/Johnson & Johnson Health Care Institute for Head Start, which conducted the study.

    Moreover, parents' being better informed about handling their children's health needs translated to a 42 percent drop in the average number of days lost at work (from 6.7 to 3.8) and 29 percent drop in days children lost at school (from 13.3 to 9.5). Parents also reported feeling more confident in making health care decisions and in sharing knowledge with others in their families and communities.

    Underwritten by Johnson & Johnson, the program carried a one-time cost of $60..."

    By Blogger George, At September 20, 2008 10:40 AM  

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