via Harvard Business Review

To understand the business case for investing in employee health, we examined existing research and then studied 10 organizations, across a variety of industries, whose wellness programs have systematically achieved measurable results. In group and individual interviews, we met with about 300 people, including many CEOs and CFOs. We asked about what works, what doesn’t, and what overall impact the program had on the organization. Using our findings, we’ve identified six essential pillars of a successful, strategically integrated wellness program, regardless of an organization’s size. Passes to fitness clubs and nutrition information in the cafeteria are not enough, as you’ll see.

Read the full article here.

via Human Resources Executive Online

Although wellness programs have the potential to bring down healthcare costs, determining whether they actually can do that can be tricky.

As wellness programs have become increasingly popular — approximately 77 percent of North American companies currently have one in place, according to New York-based Buck Consultants — one question still looms: Are they paying their way?

More and more companies today are trying to find the answer. In fact, a small industry has developed around wellness measurement. Wellness providers and esteemed university research centers are offering evaluation systems that include sophisticated analyses of claims data.

“[Wellness providers] are finding they have to evaluate to stay in business,” says Adam Long, vice president of research and informatics at Onlife Health Inc., a wellness provider in Nashville, Tenn.

Yet progress has been slow. It’s costly enough to build and promote a wellness program; hiring a company or university to evaluate its effectiveness can be prohibitively expensive. So perhaps it’s not surprising that, as of last year, most companies still did not evaluate their wellness programs, according to a survey from Buck Consultants entitled Working Well: A Global Survey of Health Promotion and Workplace Wellness Strategies.

Although the survey found that 64 percent of 1,103 organizations in more than 45 countries used wellness programs, only 22 percent worldwide used metrics to measure their effectiveness. The number was higher in the United States, where 42 percent measured the effect on their healthcare cost-trend-rate. Of these employers, 43 percent reported a reduction in costs — typically 2 to 5 percentage points per year.

Click here to read the full article at Human Resources Executive Online.