Employee Health Can Be Improved With Better Wellness Programs

Dr. Purushothaman
January 22, 2014

 

There are a number of reasons why you want to enhance employee health. It not only provides a significant benefit to your employees but it also allows you to enjoy a reduced turnover rate as well as less sick days paid throughout the year. You will be able to improve the health of your employees better with wellness programs. Even if you have wellness programs in place now, you may not know how well they are performing - and therefore they may not be as sufficient as you think they are.
It is critical for you to track employee health. If you have 100 employees, you need to know about the chronic disease management, risk factors, average age of your employees, the gender ratio, and much more. The more you know about your employees, the more you can tailor wellness programs to meet their needs.
Employee health is something you have to focus on year round. If you have wellness programs in place, you want to make sure they are right for the employees that you have. Are the employees using the wellness programs? Are they seeing the benefits? Is it making a difference in their health? You have to know the answers to these questions - and if you don't, it is going to ultimately affect the health of your employees as well as the return on your investment.
You always have the potential to get a better return on your investment. No matter how much you are spending on your employee wellness programs, things can improve. You need to set benchmarks in order to have some form of measure on your employee wellness programs. If you only have a 10 percent participation rate, you may want to look at achieving a 20 percent participation rate - or even higher. If you are spending too much money on employee wellness programs, you may want to benchmark your costs and begin reducing without reducing the benefits - and this is where you will need to have data available to you at all times.
If you have a health care program in place, you are receiving data. A lot of this may be raw data and difficult to sort through. As a result, you have no way of truly tracking employee health in order to improve wellness programs. This is going to be difficult if not impossible. There is a solution and it involves using the latest technology available to you. There are benefit optimization systems that warehouse your data, sort through it, and even provide you with action plans.
The benefit optimization systems can be accessed through a secure portal online. With nothing to download to your computer, it is the ultimate way to track your employees' health and determine what wellness programs need to be put into place. You will be able to log on and view information in moments as well as pull reports at any time in order to forecast as well as to budget. This will ensure that employee health is a primary focus at all times.
About the Author
Dynamic Health Strategies (DHS) is a benefit value-optimization and management company that offers specialized employee healthcare benefit cost-management advice, tools and consulting services for Self-insured Employers and their Benefit Consultants. DHS has saved its customers millions of dollars by pinpointing waste, fraudulent billing, and improving employee wellness.

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