SAN ANTONIO—By joining forces with community and public health organizations, employers can make their worksite wellness and health promotion activities go a lot further, employer health coalition leaders say.

Through such collaborations, employers also can take advantage of funding resources that might not otherwise be available to them individually, said Gary Rost, executive director of the Savannah Business Group on Health in Savannah, Ga. In fact, many grant providers require private employer involvement to guarantee funding, he said.

Employers also are in the position to spearhead efforts to improve the quality of care delivered throughout their communities, said Sara Palermo, vp, Mid-America Coalition on Health Care in Kansas City, Mo.

“We see employers as change agents in the market, so being able to build on that momentum is really important,” Ms. Palermo said.

The three coalition leaders described the work their organizations have been doing during a panel discussion on Building the Business Care for Community Health Improvement held during the 2010 Integrated Benefits Institute/ National Business Coalition on Health Joint Health and Productivity Forum Feb. 8-10 in San Antonio.

The panel was added to the agenda of the conference that focused mainly on worksite health and productivity management.

“It's important because you're employers. You've got a captive audience for 40 hours a week at the worksite, you've got lots of opportunity to influence the behavior of your workforce. But they go home and they go into communities, and whether those communities have a healthy or unhealthy influence on your workforce is a determining factor in their health status,” said Andrew Webber, NBCH president and CEO, who moderated the panel discussion.

“Employers who are making incredible investments in worksite health and productivity activities should also be thinking about investing in the community at large,” Mr. Webber said. “But if your workforce enters a community with violence and poor food supplies, failing schools, poor economic conditions, you add to the list of social determinants of health that are factored in your own community. Your investments can be compromised and limited,” he said.

“Employers need to get engaged not only in leading health and productivity activities at the worksite, but (also) take the leap in the engagement and providing leadership and working with others to improve community health dynamics as well,” Mr. Webber said.

In fact, the NBCH, which is a coalition of coalitions, has a five-year cooperative agreement with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention aimed at building partnerships with employers and other stakeholders to establish evidence-based community health interventions, he said.

In addition, the NBCH recently launched a seed grant program to provide funding to member coalitions to help them implement community health improvement strategies.

While it may seem unusual for employers to collaborate with public health organizations, they share common goals, Mr. Rost said.

For example, when the Safety Net Planning Council, a Chatham County, Ga., initiative involving clinics for the uninsured and the underinsured, complained about emergency room overutilization, low prescription refill rates and no-shows at doctor's appointments, Mr. Rost pointed out that employers were experiencing the same problems among their insured populations.

“When the insured commercial population has the same issues as the uninsured, then it's a community problem,” he said.

As a first step to address the problem, the Savannah group is working with the council and other community health organizations to compare insured data against data from federal clinics.

“We've already done it with ER, and it confirmed what we already knew,” Mr. Rost said.

To address the obesity issue in the Kansas City area, MACHC's Building a Healthier Heartland initiative promotes environmental changes using sustainable, innovative and replicable evidence-based efforts that can be shared with other communities, Ms. Palermo said.

In Memphis, “our mission is to mobilize the greater Memphis area to achieve excellent health for all. We're no longer about improving anything, because you can improve and still not be excellent,” said Christie Travis, CEO of the Memphis Business Group on Health.

“By working across the community with multiple stakeholders, you really can have a way to engage people in the many places that they live, play, worship and work,” Ms. Travis said.