Health and wellness is quickly becoming a new mantra for businesses, said speakers who gathered last week at the Providence Business News’ Health Care & Wellness Summit to discuss the economics of health and wellness programs in the workplace.
Given the ever-increasing costs of health insurance, more and more Rhode Island businesses are turning to health and wellness initiatives to lower their expenses, increase productivity and attract and retain talent.
The Nov.1 panel discussion at the Marriott Providence Downtown featured Anne Marie Ludovici-Connolly, author of “Winning Health Promotion Strategies,” Dr. Rajiv Kumar, founder and chairman of Shape Up RI, the largest statewide wellness program in Rhode Island, Mark Converse, the regional health and wellness specialist at USI Insurance of New England, and Dr. Paul Kasuba, senior vice president and chief medical officer of Tufts Health Plan.
Ludovici-Connolly, who directed the award-winning wellness program, Get Fit RI, said that wellness programs have been transformed from a feel-good program into a serious economic strategy for businesses. She cited Dee W. Edington, author of “Zero Trends,” about the importance of integrating health into the core business strategy. “Excess costs are related to excess risks,” she explained. She offered an overview of how to develop a strategic approach to implementing wellness campaigns in the workplace, championing the need for senior management to lead the charge. “It’s important to link any health initiative to the top leadership,” she said. Ludovici-Connolly told of how she helped Yahoo, one of her corporate clients, use a “Go Healthy” campaign to increase employee participation, taking advantage of the go-green corporate culture.
Converse discussed in detail his experiences in implementing a health & wellness program at AAA, saying that these programs were “an evolution and not a revolution,” and that they needed to be evaluated as a long-term investment. In 2007, when AAA began to offer a $20 a month discount to employees who filled out a personal health assessment, participation in the wellness program grew to 90 percent, according to Converse. “The first year, it was a personal health assessment, the next year, it’s an annual physical,” he said, stressing the importance of tying the differential of potential increases in health insurance costs to employees’ decisions to participate.
Converse also stressed the need to cross the chasm from early adopters to the mainstream: “The first people who will engage are the people who don’t need the wellness campaign,” he said. “Be patient – you’ll never get 100 percent participation.”
Shape Up RI’s phenomenal growth – as well as the growth of its corporate entity, Shape Up, as a national player in the wellness field – used a different model to achieve employee engagement, according to Kumar. He described the importance of using the social network of the workplace to encourage participation, in order to make it fun for employees, rather than seem like wellness is just a financial transaction.
The key, he continued, is engagement, and a bottom-up approach. “Shape Up is a social endeavor, we ask employees to join teams,” he said. As a selling point, Kumar said that the importance of building a healthy working environment to attract and retain talent is a cost-effective argument. Using the example of his own workplace, Kumar said that it costs him about $30,000 to recruit a new programmer, compared to the $10,000 it costs to invest in the wellness program.
Tufts Health Plan’s Kasuba said that it was important to have more than a plug-and-play approach to health and wellness, building a plan that is sustainable. He stressed the importance of moving beyond self-reporting and developing metrics to measure how you create value in the workplace with health and wellness programs, identifying goals and objectives.
The managers in the audience, in turn, represented a cross section of Rhode Island companies – at one table, there were human-relations managers from Residential Properties, the Rhode Island Quality Institute, Rhode Island Housing and The Rhode Island Foundation. The number of employees ranged from 225 full time on the payroll at Rhode Island Housing, with another 40 temporary positions that also were receiving health insurance, to 34 full-time staff on payroll at Residential, with 115 independent contractors.
Participation in wellness programs at their workplace also varied; one manager said that participation in Shape Up RI had fallen off because it was small workplace where the team approach broke down. Another manager, however, was a workplace-wellness champion, riding her bike to work every day.
At the summit, Providence Business News announced a new program to recognize employers that have strong, effective health & wellness programs in the region. Winners of “Healthiest Employers 2012,” conducted in partnership with Healthiest Employers Inc., a third-party national research firm, will be recognized in April 2012. The recognition program is sponsored by Tufts Health Plan. Employers in Rhode Island and Bristol County in Massachusetts are eligible to apply. •
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