Automating Corporate Wellness Programs
Posted by John Carradine on Thu, Jun 17, 2010 @ 01:13 PM
Wellness programs are one of the most important aspects of implementing an effective benefits program for corporations. Connecting those programs to benefits plan design is a requirement if you want to ensure that your employees truly see the importance of engaging in healthy and life-changing behaviors. History has proven that purely voluntary programs have no meaningful participation, while programs offering incentives - like premium credits, reduced co-pays and co-insurance, or even cash rewards achieve much higher participation. In other words, if you want to maximize the chance that employees will engage your wellness initiatives and programs enthusiastically, tie their involvement to your plan design and make it profitable for them to do so.
Involving your benefits administrator in the program is key as well. What good is it to promise employees better benefits, if after their engagement, you don't deliver the rewards? But this can be a daunting task for an already overworked human resources team.
One key is to ensure that whoever supplies your benefits administration system, or core benefits administration platform can automatically adjust the plan design for each individual with only minimal effort on the part of your corporate staff. For instance, you may want your employees to be able to report via a web portal that they signed up for a softball team and are therefore able to receive a reward. Likewise, because you need to tie the rewards to behaviors that are ongoing, and to stop the reward if the employee stops complying with the requirements, you want the system to automatically stop calculating the benefit without any intervention from corporate staff.
Additionally, if you were working with one of the leading providers of health management solutions such as Viverae (http://www.viverae.com/), or a consumer care management system like WorldDoc (http://www.worlddoc.com/), you would want to be able to automatically link activities from their portals to a core benefits platform like Healthaxis and provide seamless integration and reporting.
In sum, we need to find ways to help our employees lead better healthier lives. The rewards to the business are ultimately immeasurable. However, we also need to be able to administer our programs with healthcare information technology systems that don't require an army to support our initiatives.