Corporate wellness and wellbeing initiatives are taking off all over the world. Doctors are reporting that more and more patients are coming into the surgery with forms that their employer has provided, and asking their medical team to measure their blood sugar or pressure, or check their cholesterol levels.
Corporate wellness programmes are a booming industry sector, worth around $6 billion. Through these, employees are offered incentives to follow a healthy lifestyle. Usually this comes in the form of coaching and financial incentives, and the employees have to meet certain health statistics, such as losing weight, quitting smoking or lowering their cholesterol levels.
The results of these tests are generally tied up with the cost of their health insurance, with employees who are less healthy ending up paying more. A new Affordable Care Act allowed that up to 30 percent of any employee’s premium could be influenced by the results of these types of programmes, which represents around $1,620 per employee per year, on average.
With the dual goal of saving employers money and improving the health of employees, these programmes sound like a very good thing, but are they actually effective.
One problem with looking at the effects of such programmes is that a recent study has discovered that less than half the companies who employ the programmes actually bother to calculate whether or not they are saving them money. This same study came up with some results which may startle them if they did take the time to calculate: wellness programmes do not appear to reduce employer health costs in any significant way.
It is thought that this is due to the fact that health screenings prompt more visits to the doctor, tests and prescription medications. These are obviously beneficial for employees’ health but does not really save them money.
It was also found that when employers found that the programmes were not saving them money, they then passed on the costs of the programmes to employees by raising their insurance premiums.
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