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Determining employees' health risks based on lifestyle key to effective company wellness program

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Determining employees' health risks based on lifestyle key to effective company wellness program

Many of the specific issues that often undermine employers' efforts to measure the return-on-investment of their wellness programs can be addressed with the addition of relatively low-cost evaluation processes and initiatives.

Through preliminary and ongoing employee population research, targeted outreach and engagement strategies and non-traditional plan offerings, wellness practitioners and consultants said employers can broaden their wellness program's potential financial benefits and obtain a more accurate measurement of those benefits.

Fundamentally, improving the accessibility and accuracy of wellness-related return-on-investment metrics requires program design and implementation strategies more closely tailored to employees' needs and the employer's capabilities.

“When you're going through the program design phase, part of the data gathering that you do needs to be focused on understanding your workforce to the extent that you can make sure that the programs you're designing are actually going to meet the needs of that population,” said Mari Ryan, chairperson of the Worksite Wellness Council of Massachusetts and CEO of Advancing Wellness, L.L.C., both based in Watertown, Mass.

Health risk assessments and biometric screenings are certainly useful in identifying chronic conditions and costly health risk trends among employees, experts said, but those assessments should, whenever possible, be combined with self-reported behavioral information to better inform programming choices.

“Employers sometimes tend to gravitate towards whatever the coolest tool at the time happens to be, but it might not be what your population needs,” said Merry DeMartino, executive vice president of talent development at San Diego-based Event Network Inc., an operator of museum gift stores. “Smoking cessation is certainly a hot topic in the wellness field, so you might figure you'll invest a lot of money in a smoking-cessation program, but find out much later that you don't have many smokers in your population.”

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Traditional wellness testing also needs to be correlated with demographic studies and internal attitudinal surveys conducted during the initial planning stages and periodically throughout the course of the program, in order to address specific impediments to both participation and health outcome improvements, experts said.

“One of the things that you need to uncover, in terms of both program designs and the behavioral changes that go on at the individual level, are the barriers that get in your employees' way that keep them from adopting healthy lifestyles,” Ms. Ryan said. “The number one thing we hear when we survey employee populations about that issue is a lack of time. You have to build programs that are going to make it easy for people to work around those barriers.”

Experts said another common issue employers often cite as a chief impediment to their wellness program's ability to generate a positive return-on-investment and, by extension, their ability to accurately measure that return—that issue being low participation rates—can be addressed using either systemic or targeted approaches, or a combination of both. Perhaps most attractively, particularly to smaller employers, neither approach necessitates the addition of costly participation-based incentives, experts said.

“One of the more systemic approaches we've seen to driving participation is to subtly incorporate wellness sign-ups into your open-enrollment period,” said Luann Heinen, vice president of the Washington-based National Business Group on Health. “Another method we're seeing some employers use is having new hires meet with the group wellness coordinator as part of their orientation.”

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To drive participation in a more targeted manner, Ms. Heinen said many employers are turning to affinity groups within their workforce. The groups are often based on different ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, geography or life stage. Employers have begun targeting their wellness communications based on the level of interest they see demonstrated among particular segments within their employee population, she said, with the least-motivated or enthusiastic employees receiving the most extensive and focused communications, while the most motivated employees are not targeted quite as aggressively.

“By working with those groups, you can develop and push programs that are more likely to appeal to a specific demographic,” Ms. Heinen said.

In terms of specific wellness services and program offerings that employers can use to boost their wellness plan's earning potential and access valuable data to support a demonstration of those earnings, experts said many companies already may have the basic elements they need in the form of their in-house employee assistance program. By tying together their wellness and EAP services, employers can correlate instances of workers seeking counseling for stress management, financial issues, legal trouble and other pressures with medical conditions such as migraines, high blood pressure, illnesses related to smoking, drug use and alcohol abuse and other potentially costly health risks.

“Wellness is comprised of a whole host of issues beyond physical health,” said Bruce Elliott, compensation and benefits manager for the Alexandria, Va.-based Society for Human Resources Management. “Especially coming off of a recession, those kinds of issues can absolutely have an impact on health outcomes.”