WASHINGTON – Employers and health plans are increasingly betting on health and wellness initiatives to help stem health care costs, even though evidence of an investment payoff is still scant because the programs are so new, a study released last week by the Center for Studying Health System Change shows.
Health and wellness activities are premised on the idea that healthier people will use fewer medical resources and be more productive. Health and wellness initiatives go beyond screening activities, such as mammograms and colonoscopies that detect disease, and differ from disease management and case management interventions, which are used once a disease is diagnosed.
The study found much of the momentum for health and wellness initiatives has come from large employers looking for long-term strategies to address rising costs and to support a broader strategy of promoting “consumer-driven” health care by giving employees more responsibility for health care decisions and costs.
“We heard from employers and health plans that health and wellness activities are the right thing to do and are particularly important as employees assume more responsibility for health care decisions and costs,” said Debra A. Draper, a senior fellow at the center and co-author of the study with health researcher Ann Tynan and senior consulting researcher Jon B. Christianson of the University of Minnesota.
The study’s findings are detailed in an issue brief, “Health and Wellness: The Shift from Managing Illness to Promoting Health,” available online at www.hschange.com/CONTENT/989/.
The study is based on site visits last year to 12 nationally representative metropolitan communities, the center said: Boston; Cleveland; Greenville, S.C.; Indianapolis; Lansing, Mich.; Little Rock, Ark.; Miami; northern New Jersey; Orange County, Calif.; Phoenix; Seattle; and Syracuse, N.Y. The center has been tracking changes in those markets since 1996. The site-visit research is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The study also found that:
• Health plans across the 12 communities are packaging, branding and marketing health and wellness activities as a way of differentiating themselves in the market; often they market them as a key component of comprehensive care management.
• Engaging enrollees is challenging because participation typically is voluntary. Most respondents believed some type of incentive was needed to engage people not only to get involved, but to actually improve their health. But incentives vary widely in size and design, including, among others, small cash payments, gift cards, discounts of gym memberships, and reimbursement for weight management programs such as Weight Watchers.
The Center for Studying Health System Change is a nonpartisan policy research organization that designs and conducts studies focused on the U.S. health care system to inform the thinking and decisions of policymakers in government and private industry. For more information, go to www.hschange.com.
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