Use Employee Wellness to Keep the Healthcare Sky from Falling

Randy Boss, a certified risk architect for Ottawa Kent Insurance in Jenison, MI recently penned an informative article that will run in the March 2014 issue of Health Insurance Underwriter magazine.  Here are excerpts from the article.

All you hear they hear is healthcare costs are out of control and the government is making it worse.  And yet, throughout this challenging period, while all the doomsayers tell us the healthcare sky is falling, I’ve seen many clients have great renewals. So how is this possible?

Employers are looking for a real solution to one of the most serious business problems they face; the ability to continue to pay benefits and be seen as a place employees want to work.

For example, I was sitting down with the management team of a client with over 100 employees to review the renewal figures for the coming year.  They had been reading the horror stories from other business owners about the state of healthcare, and were prepared for a tough meeting full of tough decisions on how to deal with what they envisioned as an enormous rate increase on the horizon. I then handed out the paperwork showing the renewal rate, which to their amazement showed a 5% decrease, with no changes and no benefit reductions.

I explained that by helping their employees benchmark their health through health risk assessments, offering health coaching so people improved and didn’t get worse, by using a healthy points system to reward those that participated and using the aggregate data from health risk assessments to make good health plan choices and claim data to measure your results, they were able to show a renewal rate going down instead of up.

In the end, what it all really comes down to are the employees

First, you must work with employers to identify their risk factors–not just the unhealthy ones, but everyone.   The goal should be over 90% employee participation in Health Risk Assessments—even better when you don’t have to provide incentives to do it.  It’s possible; we’ve done over 10,000 health risk assessments without paying one employee to do them.

Second, you need to analyze the data gathered in the health risk assessments. Thanks to having over 90% participation in health risk assessments, you now have a clear picture of the employee risk factors, stages of change, and where employees need help and support.

Third, you must put in control strategies that deal directly with the risk factors you learned from the health risk assessments.  You need to implement a population based strategy and a personal strategy which includes wellness events and programming throughout the year, as well as wellness coaching on a consistent basis so employees have someone to work with on their issues, to develop a relationship with, and to have access to a person with experience and education that they can rely on. You need this for all employees, not just those who are already healthy.

I believe there is no better time than now to lead employers from the path of bidding, quoting and shifting cost, to a process where they are able to manage their most serious business challenge and one of their most valuable assets, the health of their people.