At EMC, Wellness = Money | How a corporate leader's programs keep insurance costs down
PHOTO/EDD COTE
Antwan Kendrick, a health fitness specialist at EMC's corporate gym at its Hopkinton headquarters, gets in a little treadmill time.
If you worked at EMC Corp., you could start your day by sitting down at your desk and checking the results of bloodwork you had done at your doctor’s office last week. If your cholesterol numbers turned out to be bad news, you could click on a link to find information about how to improve them. Later, at the company cafeteria, you could glance at posted nutrition information before choosing your meal, and round out your workday with a fitness class at the corporate gym.
Wellness benefits are growing in popularity as employers try to get at the root of health insurance costs by keeping employees and their families healthier. And EMC, the Hopkinton-based technology giant, is leading the way in offering wellness programs and measuring their effectiveness.
Between 2005 and 2010, the percentage of private-sector workers with access to wellness benefits grew from 23 percent to 31 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The larger the company, the better its employees’ chance of getting the benefit — 62 percent of workers in companies with headcounts of at least 500 had access to them in 2010.
The BLS numbers are for companies that offer things like nutrition guidance, exercise incentives or smoking cessation programs. EMC’s program is significantly more comprehensive.
Delia Vetter, senior director of benefits at EMC, said it starts with regularly analyzing the health of the people covered by the company’s insurance plans — not just employees but their families too. Then, the company develops programs targeting the most common and serious issues.
“We don’t just offer programs because it’s nice to have, but rather (because it’s)very fact-based, based on the data,” she said.
Assessing Health Risks
If EMC as a corporation spends time and energy looking at health data, it expects its employees to do the same for themselves. Part of the corporate wellness program is an interactive tool called HealthLink that the company launched in 2003. Ninety percent of employees and 40 percent of their spouses have signed up and done a health risk assessment through the system.
HealthLink can automatically pull in data about a member’s doctors’ visits, prescription drugs and lab tests, along with interests they’ve expressed on an assessment questionnaire and the results of biometric screenings done at EMC offices, Vetter said. It can also direct users to articles, to regularly scheduled live presentations on health topics at the office or to a library of videos showing past presentations.
She said another aspect of the system is that it shows the real costs of any doctors’ visits or hospitalizations, along with the out-of-pocket costs employees paid, giving them a better sense of the price of care.
Squelching Cost Hikes
Vetter said the wellness programs have contributed to a relatively low growth in the company’s insurance premiums, a growth rate of less than 5 percent a year without shifting costs like co-pays and deductibles.
She said a pilot program back in 2002 showed the potential effectiveness of the company’s wellness efforts. Boston University School of Medicine recruited EMC to try out a dietary approach to fighting hypertension. More than 120 employees with the condition followed the program and let BU track their insurance claims. On average, Vetter said, participants in the program saw nearly $1,000 in savings on their health care spending.
The company gym is also branded with the HealthLink name. Vetter said her staff works with the vendor that runs the cafeterias, not just providing displays of calorie and fat content of various dishes, but also color-coding the tongs at the salad bar, to show which ingredients are healthiest.
An Option for Smaller Firms
EMC has been developing its wellness program for over a decade, and has a serious resources as a large company. But Vetter said much of what it does can be applied to companies with employee numbers in the hundreds rather than the thousands, that don’t have the resources to build something like HealthLink from scratch.
“What’s changed in the marketplace is that there are products today that are ready to sort of plug and play,” Vetter said. “I think the opportunity is there for everyone, and there are products out there for everyone.”
She said the most important thing is to build an initiative around real employee needs and make sure all aspects of the program contribute to solving them.
“If you’re rolling out a program or even a number of programs and there isn’t a strategy, most of the time it will die on the vine,” she said.
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