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Employee health, productivity measurement key to all employers: Panel

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Employee health, productivity measurement key to all employers: Panel

Measuring the total financial impact of employee health and productivity is just as vital to multinational corporations as it is to a small manufacturer in suburban Ohio, according to a panel of benefit and health management experts.

Panelists at the Fifth Annual IBI/NBCH Health and Productivity Forum said Tuesday that a thorough understanding of the relationship between workforce health, productivity and overall financial performance achieved through an integrated data management model is becoming more and more critical for employers of all sizes and industrial backgrounds.

“A comprehensive sense of the full cost impact of employee health is getting to the point where it's no longer something that's just nice to have, even for small employers,” Thomas Parry, president of the San Francisco-based Integrated Benefits Institute, said. “It's going to become a business necessity in the very near future.”

During the discussion, panelists outlined the results of a set of case studies conducted by IBI that examined three employers' efforts to integrate a broader spectrum of statistical analyses into their health management and wellness programs in order to more effectively reduce the prevalence of systemic health and productivity risk factors, as well as develop a clearer understanding of those risk factors' acute and abstract impacts on broader corporate goals and operations.

The case studies primarily focused on the extent to which the employers — New York-based American Express Co., Birmingham, Ala.-based O'Neal Steel Inc. and Middleburg Heights, Ohio-based Barrette Outdoor Living Inc. — were able to accurately gauge their performance on 10 metrics of health and productivity measurement.

The metrics were divided into three categories: leading indicators, care indicators and lagging indicators. Leading indicators included health risk factors, biometric screenings and the prevalence of chronic conditions. Care indicators included health management program participation, preventative care, utilization of medical care and employee engagement, while lagging or long-tail indicators included financial expenditures, lost time from work and lost productivity.

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Through the 2011 and 2012 plan year, American Express was able to monitor nine of the 10 metrics prescribed by the study, while O'Neal Steel and Barrette Outdoor Living were able to monitor seven of the recommended metrics.

In all three cases, panelists said, adopting integrated data analytics provided the companies with substantially greater insight into the relative effectiveness of their health management programs' design and execution, cost/benefit analyses and third-party vendor services.

Donna Cornwell, human resources director at O'Neal Steel, said her company had dabbled in health management and wellness activities prior to 2011, but had never made a concerted effort to understand the net value of those activities, either from a financial standpoint or a health outcomes standpoint.

“We had all of these activities, but we really weren't gleaning the results of those activities and the improvements — if there were any — in our employees' total health care,” Ms. Cornwell said. “We really didn't know what we were achieving.”

At the start of the 2011 plan year, O'Neal Steel rolled out a much more robust health and wellness management program, including built-in processes for collecting data from health risk assessment and biometric screening results, as well as medical, pharmacy, workers compensation, and short- and long-term disability claims.

Ms. Cornwell said the detailed analytics have not only improved the company's line-of-sight to the program's successes and failures, but have provided the means with which her department can communicate to O'Neal's senior management and shareholders the program's progress towards its short- and long-term goals.

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“We've seen percentage improvements in all of these areas in just one year. LDL cholesterol levels probably is the area in which we've been most successful. We do have a lot of employees that are getting out and exercising more, and we're on target for our goals in blood glucose levels and platinum status participation.”

Panelists also addressed some of the challenges employers are likely to encounter in pursuit of comprehensive, evidence-based health management strategies, most of which will depend greatly on an individual employer's size, industry, geographic location and workforce demographics.

Gaye Fortner, CEO of the Knoxville, Tenn.-based HealthCare 21 Business Coalition hired by Barrette to implement and coordinate a health management program for the company's distribution center in Bulls Gap, Tenn., said that one of her first and most challenging tasks at the onset of Barrette's program design and implementation was to solve for the facility managers' broader lack of familiarity with health management and wellness programs from an actuarial standpoint.

“We had to help them understand that health risk management is a course, not a one-time event, and that it's certainly possible that their costs could increase on the front end of the program,” she said. “We knew that their employees were not utilizing health care at the rate that they should have been, so we had to set them up with the right support so they could make their case for the investment, but also prepare them for the reality that these initiatives aren't easy and that they take time.”

Ms. Fortner said her group also went to great lengths to assuage privacy concerns among the facility's workers, as well as their limited access to smartphones, tablets, computers and other devices that are commonly relied upon for program communications and data aggregation.

“Many of Barrette's employees are disadvantaged from a wellness standpoint, in terms of what they know about wellness and what resources they have access to,” she said. “A lot of them are older, they don't have internet in their homes, and if they have cell phones, they're the prepaid kind that you cycle through every month.”

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