Benefits Buzz

A Soft But Heavenly Benefit - Chaplains Rotating Through Your Workplace...

I'm a HR guy by trade, and one of the things that's always made me a bit queasy is taking a stand on religion in the workplace.  I feel myself softening on that concern as I grow older, although in supporting a workgroup where they're are at least six different religions represented, it's still on my mind.

Additionally, times are tight and you have to find benefit value where you can find it.  With Medical expense bearing down on all of us, it comes as a surprise that some of the benefits that have the most impact could cost relatively little. 

Like what you ask?  How about a non-denominational Chaplin rotating through the plant or call center floor?

What? More on offering some old-time religion as a benefit to your employee base from the Bradenton Herald:

"During a routine visit at Manatee Diagnostic Center, Jim Jaeger greets employees as he makes his way through the building. He asks employees how they’re doing, follows up with some on previous concerns discussed, while some workers ask Jaeger for some time to talk. Jaeger is a corporate chaplain and he has a position in the workplace that is becoming increasingly more sought after by businesses nationwide.

He is one of 104 chaplains employed by Corporate Chaplains of America, which was founded in 1996. The program is available to employers on flat fee basis and is offered much like an extension of employee benefits.

As a member of Corporate Chaplains of America, Jaeger serves about nine companies in Manatee and Sarasota counties. His job duties are to visit local businesses that have recruited the program’s services at least once a week.

During visits, the chaplain reserves a couple hours to meet with employees and managers, on a voluntary basis, to discuss personal and professional issues on a confidential level. “We talk about anything they would like to cover,” Jaeger said. “It’s quite a bit — from family concerns, to financial concerns, to work-related stress.” 

Corporate Chaplains of America is growing so much so the organization is projecting it will employ more than 1,000 full-time chaplains and serve more than a million employees by 2012.

Currently, the corporate chaplains, who are nondenominational, serve 450 firms in 26 states. Eight years ago, Corporate Chaplains of America served fewer than 50 companies.

Like I said, I feel myself loosening up on the religion front as I turn into a crusty veteran of the HR game.  Add some positive comments from my Muslim and Hindu friends who have experienced this type of Chaplin, and I just might give it a try...

Barack Obama and Heath Care Change

There has been more excitement surrounding the election of Barack Obama as President than any president that I remember, and my memory goes back to Nixon in 1972. President Obama seems to have an ability to inspire people and bring them together at a time when we are all desperately in need of that.

We all know that one of President Obama’s passions is <health care—specifically, the idea that everyone should have access to affordable, high quality health care coverage. And we also know that there have been many failed attempts to reform a system that everyone already admits is broken.

So why is this so hard? And what really needs to happen?

It’s hard, frankly, because a lot of people spend a lot of time pointing fingers at other people. And a lot of people’s livelihoods are attached to the current system not changing very much.

At Hewitt, we’ve identified the key elements that we think are necessary for successful health care reform. It’s a long list. But I think two things are really important—critical to the whole effort. If Congress can get away from the financial crisis and spend some time on health care, two “must haves” are keeping employers at the center of the system (at least for now), and helping them to be more aggressive in improving health.

Employers should >Still Drivethe Bus

.

Even though it is an accident of history, employers have been in the health care game for a long time. If we were building a brand new system, would we put the employer at the center of it? Maybe not. But let’s face it—there is no easy way to pick up the health care coverage of over 150 million Americans without breaking the bank. Employers providing health care may not be ideal, but it works pretty well right now. In fact, group purchasing lowers health care costs and enables those who are less healthy to secure affordable coverage for themselves and their families. Additionally, the system has encouraged employers to be innovators of health care solutions through things like wellness and disease management programs.

Let’s Expect More of Employees, and Their Families

One good reason to have employers continue to provide health care is that they are direct beneficiaries of a healthy, productive work force. And they have tremendous opportunities to improve the health of their employees and their families.

We should quit smoking, lose weight, exercise more. In fact, the Centers for Disease Controlrecently revised their exercise guidelines which should make it easier for everyone to meet the recommendations. And yet we do not do it. We need to have a better understanding on what motivates people to change. We need to give employers the flexibility and support to try new and different approaches that are aimed at improving the health of their populations. So long as they are not punishing the sick, employers should be given broad flexibility to try new health improvement programs and techniques—including rewarding the healthy.

By agreeing to support just these two elements we can go a long way toward ensuring effective and robust reform.

Jeff Munn, principal at Hewitt Associates

It's The Little Things: When You Don't Measure Wellness, You Fail...

A lot of people think that being healthy is all about the stressful hour at the gym and an ascetic lifestyle/diet rivaling that of a cloistered monk (and not in one of those monasteries that brews yummy beer). The truth is actually a lot less likely to make it the stuff of a good television mini-series.

Small, intelligently thought out changes made consistently over long periods of time are much more likely to produce sustainable results than are heroic efforts that can only be sustained for a couple of months at a time. In wellness, it seems, pacing is key. This is true for both the individual wellness program and the corporate wellness program.

We will cover a corporate wellness example today.

When you don't measure, you fail.

True story. I talk to a lot of people about corporate wellness. Many people tell me they have a corporate wellness program in place. When I ask what program they have in place they typically rattle off one or all of the following answers: a wellness fair, an online portal offered for free or low cost by their health plan or Employee Assistance Program, a yoga class, on-site massage, a corporate gym membership.

My next question? "What is participation like in your {fill in random program here} program?"

The answer (normally a variation of one of two responses)

The truth: "I don't know," or, "It is pretty lousy - just a handful of people."

The euphemistic version of the truth cooked up to make the respondent feel better about spending money on this program:

Respondent: Well there are a couple of people here who seem to really like the program and {more totally anecdotal blah blah blah} there's been quite a positive response.
Me: So have you participated?
Respondent: ......
Me: So about how many people, would you say, have given you this positive feedback?
Respondent: A lot
Me: 5? 10?
Respondent: Well the Director's assistant...
Me: 2? 20?
Respondent: Maybe 3
Me: Out of how many employees?
Respondent: 2,000

Ok so the rosey assessment of their wellness offering is based on a sample size of less than 1% of their employee population??!?!?! I'm sorry, but in this economy please hope that I never am your manager. Because if I find out that you are justifying an expenditure with anecdotal feedback and a quantitative evaluation with a sample size of 0.0015% I will fire you.

Measurement helps you manage programs so that you get more for each $

When companies, consumers, the government, banks, and - hey - just about anyone who turns on the radio or TV these days is blowing a freaking gasket about the economy you need to be able to show that you are making effective use of your company's money.

Even if your company's cash position is solid, perception is reality and investors, managers and employers are taking this very grave moment in history as an opportunity for a little financial introspection. When the top brass turns its eye on your pet programs, you'd better show that they have value and that you are creatively exploring ways to get more for your money.

Today I will let sleeping dogs lie and side step the issue of how effective any of the specific programs mentioned above are likely to be outside the confines of a strategic, planned, well-measured and effective wellness program design. Let's just assume all of the programs are fantastic and each is amazingly effective at transforming the health of its participants {cough}.

But I do have to complain about the very minimum employers could do to ensure the effectiveness of wellness programs but often don't do: measure them. Data is one of those little things - those small, pesky continuous things that is not fun to collect, clean or analyze for most of us.

On the flip side, those who have meticulously gathered data around wellness have shown that well-rounded, multi-year, multicomponent wellness programs produce significant, positive return on investment (ROI). This is especially vital to businesses who shoulder the health care costs of employees - a cost that now makes up the lion's share of employer sponsored benefits.

The catch?

1. The average study length of effective, multi-component wellness programs is 3.6 years.
2. The average cost of effective, multi-component wellness programs is $150 (or more!) per employee per year.
3. The average participation in effective, multi-component wellness programs must be more than 40% in order to make a dent in health care costs.

If you are going to be allowed to manage a program that is responsible for that much in spending, for those many years, and touches half or more of your workforce, do you think anecdotal evidence is going to help this program survive the revolving door of HR Directors, C-Suite execs or directors at your company?
Take a minute to answer that.
No?
Oh really.

Measure measure measure.
Look at the data in excruciating detail. Get deep into it. Ask questions. Are you not a numbers person? Find someone who is. Hire someone who is. Make excel your Valentine. Ask all the questions that the CFO and shareholders will be asking you. Dissect the data 20 different ways until you feel satisfied that you understand. At a freaking minimum - measure program cost and participation and ask how and whether you can get more people to particpate for the same or less money.

When someone asks you how many people use your program and how much it costs per person, produce a cogent answer. If the number looks unimpressive present a convincing plan on how you will improve matters.

The easiest way to ensure you do this is to pick 6 key things to measure early on in your program. Define what you are measuring, how that measure relates to some of your company's strategic goals, where the data comes from and how often it needs to be collected, and some of the considerations and assumptions you are making when analyzing the data. Once you've pulled that together in a one page overview, simply filling in new data points should not be too difficult.

Editor's Note - It's hard to be humble when you're bloggin' straight out of Portland, Oregon.  Tanya Barham is the Founder and CEO of Recess Wellness, a company where all the staff works like little elves at Christmastime to transform their client's workplaces into healthy, happy, productive places akin to Santa's workshop at the North Pole.  Seriously.  Of course, Santa's fat, so they still have work to do.

This is Why You're Fat...

Ripped straight from the Consumerist, too good not to share on a Friday:

"This Is Why You're Fat posts reader pictures of the incredible calorie bombs they've discovered, like The Hamdog, "A hot dog wrapped in a beef patty that's deep fried, covered with chili, cheese, onions, served on a hoagie bun topped with two fistfuls of fries and a fried egg." Really, it's about efficiency. Who has time for all those meals when you can just eat one and get all the calories you need for the next couple of days?"

Check out the site for the gore-related pictures.  You'd like to think this could be used in a wellness campaign, but at the end of the day, it probably does more to create a cult of personality related to horrible foods people eat when dining out, and the ability to upload a photo makes it cool to the end user.

The end user would be you.  This is why you're fat (they said it, not me...)

Can a Widespread Rollout of EMR Really Save $7 Billion?

You start finding a billion here, and a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money...

More on the cost/benefit of EMR from Forbes:

In addition to funding an expansion of state Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, the Washington Post has reported there are plans to allocate upward of $10 billion to implement a nationwide, interoperable electronic medical records (EMR) system. The investment could jump-start a flurry of spending on health information technology (IT).

This sounds ideal, but it's an expensive proposition. Campaign for America's Future, a liberal think tank based in Washington, D.C., expects a nationwide electronic medical records system to cost $7.6 billion a year over 15 years.

The high cost is due partly to the fact that few providers currently use health IT. By 2006, only 12% of America's physicians and 11% of its hospitals had adopted computer applications to help modernize their record keeping, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

But there's a potential return on the high cost. Last week, the CBO released a study estimating that the implementation of health information technology, including EMRs, could save $7 billion in the first five years."

You buy it?

People: Take Your Drugs, Please...

The big idea to control medical trend this year, and every year after that?  Get in shape?  Well... yeah, but let's start with something that isn't at the apex of behavior modification and for the most part, doesn't hurt.

Take your drugs people.  That the hundred billion dollar idea is what CVS CEO Tom Ryan is pushing. Before you get up on your soapbox about the overmedicated state of the United States, hear him out, please... (?)

More on the CVS dream from BusinessWeek:

"During his 15 years as CEO of CVS (CVS), Tom Ryan transformed the company from a New England drugstore chain into a national health-care colossus with $76.3 billion in annual sales. He did that through a string of major acquisitions, paying $27 billion for drug middleman Caremark in 2007 and $2.9 billion for West Coast regional chain Longs Drug Stores (LDG) last October.

CVS/Caremark is now one of the 20 biggest companies in America, surpassing Boeing (BA), Target (TGT), and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ). The Woonsocket (R.I.) outfit is the largest single buyer and dispenser of prescription drugs in the nation. The Longs deal extends the chain's retail presence from Maine to Hawaii, with nearly 7,000 stores and more than 50 million users of its CVS loyalty card in the U.S.

What does Ryan intend to do with his drugstore empire? His goal, he says, is to help transform America's expensive and often ineffective health-care system. Seeking to take advantage of President Barack Obama's commitment to health-care reform, Ryan wants to use CVS's vast prescription database and burgeoning network of in-store clinics to treat patients with chronic diseases and help keep them out of the hospital, where most medical costs are incurred. "I don't think our health-care system is broken," Ryan says. "We are just spending too much, and it's unproductive."

Few industry experts would argue. Hospital visits prompted by chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, and arthritis impose an immense burden on health resources in the U.S. The total annual bill for diabetes alone is upwards of $170 billion, according to the American Diabetes Assn. Many of these costs would evaporate if patients simply complied with their doctors' orders and took their medications. In fact, about one-third of all patients who begin a drug regimen never refill the prescription, either because they don't feel sick, they forget, or they don't want to spend the money.

Ryan believes CVS could help solve this problem and, in the process, boost its own bottom line. As a pharmacy benefit management company, the Caremark unit handles drug coverage for large employers and health plans, negotiating discounts with drugmakers. It owns a treasure trove of prescription drug data, as does CVS. The merged company is thus an info tech Goliath, filling or managing more than a billion prescriptions a year. It can use that information to figure out which customers require a gentle reminder to come in for a refill."

The key issue here is privacy, how hard the nudge can be, and what the penalty could be if people don't follow the drug regiments. 

So we have Billions on the table that can be captured by allowing hard nudges?  I'm for it, but only if we're willing to withdraw funding or coverage who don't do what they need to do.

Corporate Gym Memberships (i.e. Paying Employees To Not Go To The Gym).

If you like paying for stuff your employees don't use - try a gym!

A 2005 study by two California researchers, titled "Paying Not to Go to the Gym," examined nearly 8,000 gym members' attendance over three years. You might be surprised to learn that 85% of users who bought a monthly contract were spending more money than if they paid on a per-use basis. That's because most members paid more than $70 per month but only visited the gym 4.8 times each month. They paid about $17 for each visit.

How effective were those 4+ visit per month at actually transforming members' health? It's anyone's guess, but chances are a 30 minute workout on the treadmill and a couple of half-hearted bicep curls are hardly enough to make a dent in the number of calories found in daily latte, scone or other weekday indulgence.

Fight!  This could get ugly:

The 300 Pound Gorilla:
Corporate Gym Membership

Weighing in at an average of $35-70 for each of your employees per month, this hometown favorite is sure to pummel employees with early cancellation fees when they realize that their 4 trips per month just aren't cutting the mustard.  And for you the employer?  Each attendee's 4 trips per month to make a trip to the sauna and catch up on sitcoms as they gingerly touch the pedals of a recumbent bike is never, never, ever going to make a dent in your health care or absenteeism costs.  I don't care what anyone else tells you.

 - VERSUS -

The Contender:
Your Company's Own Home Grown On-Site Program

Creating a simple on-site health and wellness program at your own company might not be the most sophisticated option, but is not a bad start.  It can often cost less than a catered dinner for one of your larger departments.  Use your network to find qualified presenters and set up a series of topics that are relevant to your workforce.  Pay the presenters and ask them not to sell to your employees (which will make people hate the classes).  If they are good, invite them back.  Get a team involved and have them help you promote the program through relentless word of mouth, emails, posters and anything else that will get people's attention - if only for a moment. 

Take the money that you would have spent on a corporate gym membership and offer it as an incentive for employees who attend a certain percentage of the seminars you hold, or, rotate incentives (i.e. anyone who comes to a seminar for the very first time qualifies for an incentive). 

True, this is not the most effective, expensive version of corporate wellness; however, it is a heck of a lot better than paying for something that no one uses.  Better yet, if they aren't using it you know it and can either:

1. find ways to promote better use, or,
2. drop the cost altogether and find a benefit with more universal appeal.

Editor's Note - It's hard to be humble when you're bloggin' straight out of Portland, Oregon.  Tanya Barham is the Founder and CEO of Recess Wellness, a company where all the staff works like little elves at Christmastime to transform their client's workplaces into healthy, happy, productive places akin to Santa's workshop at the North Pole.  Seriously.  Of course, Santa's fat, so they still have work to do.

Pulp Fiction? Is the Key to Wellness (And Weight Loss) Keeping a Diary of What You Eat?

Lots of stuff available on the topic of weight loss, wellness, etc.  Could it be that the key to losing weight, eating healthier and keeping your key metrics (heart rate, cholesterol, glucose, blood pressure, etc.) in check is keeping A DIARY?

Say it isn't so.  Can you imagine John Wayne, Arnold or Samuel L. Jackson keeping a diary to drop a few pounds?  From Time's Sanjay Gupta:

"Two nights ago, I had a handful of M&M's. In fact, I can tell you I ate seven of the peanut kind, which is my favorite. Under normal circumstances, I would've simply grabbed a bunch, mindlessly eaten them while talking to a colleague and forgotten them entirely.

Instead, I know the specific number I ate because I am keeping a food diary. I write down everything I consume, with great detail. I had a single packet of ketchup with my eggs the other morning and 4 oz. (113 g) of green-tea-flavored frozen yogurt with my daughter two days before that. I started the diary because I wanted to test the striking new results of a paper published in the August issue of American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Scientists at several clinical-research centers in the U.S. found that dieters who kept a food diary lost twice as much weight as those who didn't.

The study tracked nearly 1,700 overweight or obese adults across the country who were at least 25 years old. Men and women were included, and 44% of the group was African American. All participants were encouraged to use such weight-loss maintenance strategies as calorie restriction, weekly group sessions and moderately intensive exercise as well as to keep a food journal. The senior investigator, Victor Stevens of Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, Ore., told me that "hands down, the most successful weight-loss method was keeping a record of what you eat." In the six-month study, participants who kept a food journal six or seven days a week lost an average of 18 lb. (8 kg), compared with an average of 9 lb. (4 kg) lost by non-diary keepers."

Click through for the rest of the article, which focuses on the self-awareness you gain, and the accountability of that diary being readily available for your spouse to review, etc.   Twice as much weight loss through keeping a Diary - pretty compelling stuff.

Give it a try in your wellness program today, but put on your PR hat.  Guys respond better to writing in a book if you call it a journal or maybe a "guide".  Make sure you get some notepads without flowers or seals on the cover as well...

And don't be surprised if you get something like this from the guys, who are helpless when it comes to keeping a diary...

Vincent Vega: "And you know what they call a ... a ... a Quarter Pounder with cheese in Paris?"
Jules: "They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with cheese?"
Vincent Vega: "No man, they got the metric system. They wouldn't know what a Quarter Pounder is."
Jules: "Then what do they call it?"
Vincent Vega: "They call it a "Royale" with cheese."
Jules: "A "Royale" with cheese! What do they call a Big Mac?"
Vincent Vega: "A Big Mac's a Big Mac, but they call it "le Big-Mac"."
Jules: ""Le Big-Mac"! Ha ha ha ha! What do they call a Whopper?"
Vincent Vega: "I dunno, I didn't go into Burger King."

Your 100% 401k Match is Weak Compared to....McDonalds?

You expect to get beat on the 401k front by GE, Google and Microsoft.  You don't expect to get beat by McDonald's.

Right - the McDonald's with "hamburgler". More on the McDonald's 401k from BusinessWeek:

"To stanch the bleeding of valuable talent, McDonald's in 2004 began offering a rich retirement savings perk. Employees who put 5% of their salary in the company 401(k) receive a company match of as much as 11%, turbocharging their savings right off the bat. To make sure employees take advantage of the program, McDonald's has made enrollment automatic. And to ease the pain of automatically deferring 1% of pay, the company gave managers a one-time, 1% salary increase.

McDonald's corporate match is especially extravagant at lower levels of saving: employees who put just 1% of their salary in the plan get $3 for every $1 they invest. (Most companies won't even match a contribution until an employee puts in at least 3%.) McDonald's then makes a dollar-for-dollar match on the next 4%. After that there's a potential profit-sharing match of up to 4%. All told, workers who save 5% of their pay can see the total swell to 16%.

But corporate 401(k) plans aren't an if-you-build-it-they-will-come kind of benefit. Companies can send out pamphlets, but the burden of persuading employees that the plans are worthwhile ultimately falls on people like Kenny Sanders, who heads human resources for the "Heartland" region of McDonald's, overseeing 76 company-owned stores. Like Travis, Sanders, 44, started working at McDonald's in St. Louis when he was a teenager. Over the past 28 years he has risen through the ranks beyond store manager to corporate management.

McDonald's crew members don't sit in front of computers all day, leaving little opportunity to check 401(k) balances or make tweaks to asset allocation plans at work. So Sanders spends much of his time out in the field talking to employees about their financial future. "My goal is to get people to understand that this is more than a job. You can put away a nice nest egg for you and your family, depending on how long you stay at this company," Sanders says."

Overdosed America - Taking On The Health Care Crisis One Step At A Time

I work for a Veteran's Health Research organization so naturally we get November 11th off each year as a holiday. Not so for me this year. Instead I attended a "Wells Fargo Health Solutions Seminar with Dr. John Abramson".

I wasn't sure what to expect as the title was a little vague and I hadn't yet heard of Dr. A. All I knew is that our broker at ABD kept saying what a great event this was going to be. I had no idea I would come away all fired up and politicized, ready to demand my rights as a consumer and take on the entire Health Care Crisis singlehandedly.

...Let me explain...

In 2004 Dr. Abramson wrote a book called "Overdo$ed America The Broken Promise Of American Medicine--How The Pharmaceutical Companies Are Corrupting Science, Misleading Doctors, And Threatening Your Health (And up in the left hand corner there is a little balloon that says "The Truth About Vioxx, Celebrex, Statins, and More). OK, that's all you need to know--end of POST--just READ THE BOOK... In it he totally busts Big Pharma and a lot of the so-called research findings that come out of studies funded by Pharmaceutical companies. I know this isn't necessarily news to many of us, however the facts and statistics he lays out, and analysis he uses to derive his conclusions are very compelling. In person he is an impassioned speaker on behalf of reasonable, sane, effective health-care reform. Do away with the expensive drugs and procedures as routine, matter of course

From the book, pg 209-210...

"Pretending to care about our health is often just part of the drug and other medical industries' overall strategy to increase their sales. They dominate the medical journals, airwaves, newspapers, and magazines with "information" designed to convince doctors and patients that their products are essential for good health. They focus attention on the health problems and solutions that are the most commercially advantageous rather than most beneficial for our health." ...

"The truth, as we have seen, is that the benefits of medical care are real but limited, and more is not always better, and is often worse. These awkward facts get shoved into the background of our common wisdom buy the bright lights of advertising and medical news that shine incessantly on the "breakthroughs" in medical progress and the drugs you should "talk to your doctor about." By saturating our sources of information, the medical industry has convinced most Americans that the answer to almost every health problem can be found in a brand-name pill or high-priced medical procedure.

That's the bad news. And it's very bad, costing Americans hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and even worse, compromising our health and quality of life. But there is good news too--and it's enormously good: the evidence from study after study, including gold-standard randomized clinical trials, shows that we can usually do a great deal more to maintain our own health than the medical industry, particularly the drug industry, promises it can do for us."

In subsequent posts I'll discuss what Dr. Abramson suggests we can we can do, from the inside, as Benefits Professionals, to begin to make an impact and change how things are now to how they could possibly be in the future.

Editor's Note - Joan Gibson is a Benefits Analyst for NCIRE, which is the non-profit organization charted by congress back in the 80's to manage all the government funding/grants/contracts for the medical research projects happening at the SF VA Medical Center.  When she's not attending a conference, you'll find her on the phone trying to squeeze usage stats out of unsuspecting targets like the NCIRE EAP vendor....

Making a Case for Wellness Initiatives...

I attended the National Business Group on Health’s annual conference on Health, Productivity, and Human Capital in December.  If you don’t know already, the Business Group is “…the nation's only non-profit organization devoted exclusively to representing large employers' perspective on national health policy issues and providing practical solutions to its members' most important health care problems.”

The conference provided a unique opportunity to see what forward thinking companies and leaders in  the health care community are doing to try to move our healthcare system forward.  Their message?  To fix our ailing health care system, we need to change it from one focused almost entirely on responding to illness and injury to one that focuses on wellness and prevention.

I’ll admit -- I’m not a touchy feely kind of guy.  In fact, I’ve said to more than one of my benefits colleagues that our jobs somewhat desensitize us.  We focus a lot of our attention on efficient and effective plan design, streamlined processes, and controlling costs.  Depending on the size of your organization, folks in your company’s benefits group may have little or no face to face interaction with employees.

We’re a numbers driven bunch.  Whether we’re managing our benefits administrators or reviewing our health plans’ experience data to determine trend, we spend a lot of time looking at metrics.  We have a tendency to focus our attention on cost containment, which is important.  Our executive team is looking to us to ensure that spend on health and welfare benefits doesn’t spin out of control. 

This is a tough enough assignment in today’s environment, but the Business Group argues that we should be more strategic in nature.  We should start focusing our attention on figuring out how to tie our benefits programs together in a way that results in a healthier population, thus reducing health care expenses.  But it requires more than just a well designed benefits program.  In order to be successful, an organization must become one that focuses on developing a culture of wellness.  This is the hard part, especially in today’s environment, as we’re so focused on broader economic metrics. 

What’s the payoff?  A healthier, more productive workforce -- one that misses fewer days of work and is more effective when they are at work.  A workforce that’s both physically and mentally healthy will be more productive than one that’s not.  This is a message that should get your operations leaders on board in developing a healthier work environment.

Developing a culture of wellness has to start at the top.  Leaders within your organization have to lead the charge in developing an environment that encourages health.  But you know as well as I do that the folks in the executive office are numbers people (sound familiar?).  So making a strong case for changing a company’s culture to focus more on health is dependent on your ability to develop metrics to tell your story.

It’s a daunting task.  There were moments during the conference that I thought to myself, “This is great in theory, but nearly impossible in reality.”  But the bottom line is that the challenge is not just one that we’re facing as companies.  It’s one that we’re facing as a nation.  If we’re not able to change the way that we address health care in this country, the situation will only get worse. 

Editor's Note - Greg Dagley is a Benefits Consultant for a large multinational employer in Houston, TX. While his company has employees all over the globe, his job keeps him focused on US benefits and spending a lot of his time managing external vendors.  Is there any doubt his excel skills are more advanced than yours?

Portable Medical Histories - Is Walmart Now Progressive with Employees?

The company many of you love to hate - Walmart - hit the headlines recently for being progressive via a company-wide rollout of digital medical history technology across its employee-base. 

Why's that news?  A quick jog of your memory might have you recall this is the same company that once wrote a memo to its board on controlling healthcare costs and - get this - recommended job redesign so checkout employees had to go retrieve carts in the parking lot during their shifts.  The thought was that the most unhealthy in the ranks wouldn't be able to do that part of the job, so they'd have to leave the company and take the high cost of sponsoring their healthcare elsewhere.

Nice!  If you forgot that blast from the past, you can see the entire memo of Darwinian ideas here.

Still, Walmart's been doing better on the PR front lately, so let's give them a chance.  More on the e-Health initiative from Walmart from BusinessWeek:

"Starting early next year, Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) employees will spend less time filling out forms in the doctor's office. They'll be able to log on to the company's intranet to download and print any medical records their physicians require: allergy information, prescriptions, blood tests, entire health histories if necessary. After nearly a year of pilot tests, the Bentonville (Ark.) retailer made this option available to 1 million U.S. staffers who are eligible for insurance under its benefits enrollment program this fall. Thousands of employees have signed up, making this initiative one of the most ambitious thrusts into digital medical records, or "e-health," by any U.S. company.

Wal-Mart's program is part of a larger strategy embraced by incoming Chief Executive Michael Duke both to improve the company's image as an employer and to cut long-term costs. The retailer faces steadily rising health-care expenses, and it's not alone. A recent survey of nearly 3,000 U.S. companies by global consulting firm Mercer found that health-related costs are up 6%, on average, for the fourth straight year. Linda M. Dillman, Wal-Mart's executive vice-president for benefits and risk management, believes digital records will help by fostering "healthier associates who are more productive." And the move has an impact on other companies wondering "how to make a business case," she says. "It's easier when someone like a Wal-Mart goes first."

Walmart's biggest challenge with potable medical histories will be getting past the employee trust issues based on the PR of the past.  Even though the service is provided by a non-profit technology collective, as long as Walmart is footing most of the bill, many employees will remain skeptical of the service.

Also, as someone who pays medical costs for my employer, I don't know how the medical histories create healthier associates who are going to save the company a lot of money.  As the article says, I know accurate medical histories enhance the accuracy of care, but to really have healthier employees, you need them to do two things - exercise and eat right. 

Sadly, I don't think the software will create opportunities in either of those areas.

The company many of you love to hate - Walmart - hit the headlines recently for being progressive via a company-wide rollout of digital medical history technology across its employee-base. 

Why's that news?  A quick jog of your memory might have you recall this is the same company that once wrote a memo to its board on controlling healthcare costs and - get this - recommended job redesign so checkout employees had to go retrieve carts in the parking lot during their shifts.  The thought was that the most unhealthy in the ranks wouldn't be able to do that part of the job, so they'd have to leave the company and take the high cost of sponsoring their healthcare elsewhere.

Nice!  If you forgot that blast from the past, you can see the entire memo of Darwinian ideas here.

Still, Walmart's been doing better on the PR front lately, so let's give them a chance.  More on the e-Health initiative from Walmart from BusinessWeek:

"Starting early next year, Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) employees will spend less time filling out forms in the doctor's office. They'll be able to log on to the company's intranet to download and print any medical records their physicians require: allergy information, prescriptions, blood tests, entire health histories if necessary. After nearly a year of pilot tests, the Bentonville (Ark.) retailer made this option available to 1 million U.S. staffers who are eligible for insurance under its benefits enrollment program this fall. Thousands of employees have signed up, making this initiative one of the most ambitious thrusts into digital medical records, or "e-health," by any U.S. company.

Wal-Mart's program is part of a larger strategy embraced by incoming Chief Executive Michael Duke both to improve the company's image as an employer and to cut long-term costs. The retailer faces steadily rising health-care expenses, and it's not alone. A recent survey of nearly 3,000 U.S. companies by global consulting firm Mercer found that health-related costs are up 6%, on average, for the fourth straight year. Linda M. Dillman, Wal-Mart's executive vice-president for benefits and risk management, believes digital records will help by fostering "healthier associates who are more productive." And the move has an impact on other companies wondering "how to make a business case," she says. "It's easier when someone like a Wal-Mart goes first."

Walmart's biggest challenge with potable medical histories will be getting past the employee trust issues based on the PR of the past.  Even though the service is provided by a non-profit technology collective, as long as Walmart is footing most of the bill, many employees will remain skeptical of the service.

Also, as someone who pays medical costs for my employer, I don't know how the medical histories create healthier associates who are going to save the company a lot of money.  As the article says, I know accurate medical histories enhance the accuracy of care, but to really have healthier employees, you need them to do two things - exercise and eat right. 

Sadly, I don't think the software will create opportunities in either of those areas.

You'll Have Stained Teeth, but a Starbucks Jones Keeps It Real as you Age....

Why do I have an IV line into my arm from Starbucks?  Glad you asked, this clip from MedHeadlines makes it clear:

A collaborative team of researchers from Sweden and Denmark enrolled 2,000 adults in the study 21 years ago.  Participants self-reported their dietary habits, including their daily coffee consumption.  After over two decades, more than 70% of the participants could be tracked for follow-up evaluations.  That the research team could find 1,409 now-middle-aged participants out of the original 2,000 is considered an unusually high number.

During those 21 years, 61 people developed dementia.  Of those 61, 48 developed Alzheimer’s disease.

After evaluating the effects of many health and socioeconomic factors, including high cholesterol counts, the research team concluded the participants who drank between three and five cups of coffee a day were 65% less likely to develop dementia than those who drank less.  Drinking even more than five cups a day was also associated with a reduced risk of developing dementia but the number of participants drinking this much coffee was too small to be statistically significant.

So sure, I've got stained teeth, but I'll be sharp as a whip when I'm 85.  Checkers anyone?