Knowhow: Health At The Office | What employers can do to lower medical bills
Even with the recent enactment of health-care reform legislation, the Obama administration has made it clear that prevention and personal responsibility are critical elements of an effective health-care reform strategy.
Why? Because health is largely not a matter of luck, but rather smart choices. More than 75 percent, or $1.5 trillion, of our nation’s health-care costs come from preventable chronic diseases — the majority of which are driven by personal health behaviors such as inactivity, smoking and poor diet.
But by taking simple steps such as being more physically active, Americans can reduce the likelihood of longer-term health implications and lifestyle-related health-care costs, and ease the strain on individuals and families, our health-care system and the employers who fund many of these costs.
Putting Prevention to Work
Both the public and private sectors recognize their role in helping to turn the tide on employee health and productivity. Many are deploying preventative health-care initiatives as an effective strategy to share the responsibility of health-care costs between employer and employee, and encourage employees to make better health decisions. A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers study revealed that 80 percent of executives surveyed believed the most promising option for reducing corporate health-care cost increases was to provide financial incentives for employees to live healthier lifestyles. And many corporations are putting this concept into action by implementing incentive-based programs where healthy behaviors are rewarded.
It’s a logical model already being used in other aspects of today’s society, and is based upon the causal links between individual behavior and costs. For instance, individuals with an accident-free driving record enjoy safe driver discounts on their auto insurance premiums.
A Pay-for-Prevention Approach
The benefit of the Pay-for-Prevention approach, pioneered by Virgin HealthMiles, is that such programs create a culture of prevention that aligns the interests of employers and employees to drive down lifestyle-related health-care costs. The beauty of prevention in the workplace is that it doesn’t have to be expensive or complex. Rather, it’s a matter of giving people the technology, information and motivation they need to make long-term healthy behavior changes. And for hundreds of companies, rewarding employees for healthy behaviors is working. Those groups are reporting unprecedented levels of employee engagement, increased activity levels and improved health biometric data.
Workplace prevention programs can even be funded through higher health-care premiums paid by those employees who do not positively change their behaviors and cost more in the long run. This funding mechanism allows employers to take proactive steps toward reducing chronic medical bills at a net-zero impact to their budgets.
Conclusion
Organizations looking to deploy a prevention-based health care strategy should seek out and invest in incentives-based programs that create a culture of prevention and effectively address the interests of both the employers and employees in order to drive down lifestyle-related health-care costs. This balance in effectively addressing both audiences’ needs will ensure broad participation, long-term healthy behaviors and ultimately lower health-care costs for the organization and its employees.
Sean Forbes is president of Virgin HealthMiles (www.virginhealthmiles.com), a Framingham-based provider of employee health and productivity programs that reward individuals for getting healthy.
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