Dive Brief:
- The most common benchmark for demonstrating return on investment (ROI) of health management programs has been medical cost savings.
- Employers are realizing that there are alternative health/wellness program success measures, including VOI (value of investment).
- In fact, in a recent survey 91% of employers offer health and wellness programs for reasons beyond medical cost savings.
Dive Insight:
According to an article from Employee Benefits News, Optum and the National Business Group on Health (NBGH) teamed up for a research study that found employers report investing in wellness programs for three primary reasons: reducing employee health risks, reducing health care costs, and improving employee productivity.
The article says that by pairing primary and emerging drivers for health and wellness programs, employers can begin to view the benefits of these programs more broadly. For example, companies with mature health management programs – six years or more – are more likely to value employee productivity as well as cost savings, according to the survey. The key is for employers and their health management vendor partners to start building metrics to demonstrate results.
Many employers and vendors are seeing the need to shift the conversation from ROI to value-of-investment (VOI), which represents the total value of employee health and wellness programs by capturing emerging metrics—including less "presenteeism" and reduced sick days, among others—in addition to direct medical cost savings.
"This is the beginning of a trend that is, frankly, long overdue," writes the article's author, Seth Serxner, Optum's chief health officer.
