Workplace Wellness Prevents Chronic Diseases

The cost of healthcare is rising every year, for both employers and individuals. There are a lot of factors that lead to this situation, not all of which are within the control of employers or their workers. But there are still some ways that companies and their employees can combat the rising cost of healthcare: implementing corporate wellness programs.

According to the CDC, 75% of healthcare costs are generated by chronic diseases, which include heart disease, stroke, and obesity. In addition to being the biggest burden on the healthcare system, many of these conditions are also largely preventable. Stroke, heart attack, and other chronic health problems are often caused by lifestyle choices, meaning that programs that help people reverse harmful lifestyle choices can largely lead to these kinds of health problems being prevented.

Workplace health programs don’t just improve the overall health of the people who work at a company; they reduce that company’s healthcare costs as well. People who live healthy lifestyles tend to have lower health claims, resulting in savings for them and the companies that pay a portion of their employees’ premiums. And, when employees live healthier lives, they are less likely to miss work due to illness. Corporate health initiatives help reduce costs both by reducing sick days and by bringing down the cost of health care.

Learn more by contacting Wellsource today at 800-533-9355.

How Corporate Wellness Improves Company Loyalty

If you’re not convinced that corporate wellness programs make a difference, here are a couple of statistics that might change your mind. According to Dr. Roger Sahoury, author of Gladiator’s Guide to Corporate Health & Wealth, 55% of workers said that workplace wellness programs were at least partially

responsible for improvements in their overall health. More than that, company health programs accounted for $250 million dollars in healthcare savings, and led to a 50% reduction in cases of employees suffering from high blood pressure at workplaces where they were implemented.

In addition to making employees healthier (and happier) in their daily lives, corporate wellness programs also have the added benefit of making workers happier with the companies they work for. When their employer provides them with resources that allow them to improve their lives, it demonstrates to them that their company cares about them and their wellbeing. And when employees believe that the company they work for cares about them and their happiness, and not just the work it can get out of them, they feel a deeper connection with the company than just the provider of their paychecks.

It’s no secret that happier employees are more loyal employees, and that overall health has an impact on productivity. In other words, corporate wellness programs are a benefit to both employees and the people who work for them. They improve employee morale and health, which improves performance and productivity in return.

Want to learn more about implementing a workplace health program at your company? Contact Wellsource today at 800-533-9355.

 

Sources

1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinharrington/2015/05/13/corporate-wellness-health-wellness-and-an-improved-bottom-line/

 

How to Prevent Tension Neck Syndrome in the Workplace

For many people, doing their job requires sitting at a desk for several hours straight every day, something that the human body was not meant to do. When it is stuck in a relatively fixed position for long periods of time, the body can develop some painful, debilitating conditions that interfere with a person’s ability to work and enjoy their life outside the office.

One of these conditions, tension neck syndrome (TNS), is common in workplaces where employees spend long periods of time on the phone. TNS is most often caused when a person spends long hours with their neck twisted in an unnatural position, like the one people use to hold a phone between their shoulder and ear. It can also appear when people sit for long periods of time at a computer desk typing. Symptoms of TNS include:

• Pain or tenderness in the neck and shoulders
• Muscle tightness

If employees in your workplace spend long periods of time talking on the phone or sitting at a desk, there is a possibility that they could begin to suffer from TNS. There are several steps that can be taken to prevent TNS in the workplace:

• Provide employees with headsets, phone cradles, and other phone accessories that take away the need for them to bend their necks to the side for long hours every day.
• Allow employees with shoulder or back problems to use ergonomic chairs/desks and other back/shoulder health products throughout the day.
• Encourage employees to take breaks from sitting and walk around and stretch.
  

Want to learn more about improving staff wellness? Contact Wellsource today at 800-533-9355.

3 Strange (but True) Health Tips

We've all heard the usual lifestyle assessment health tips – stay active, eat your vegetables, avoid fatty foods, etc. But there are some health tips that seem to run counter to accepted wisdom, yet still have a positive effect on body and mind.

1. Don't brush your teeth immediately after eating acidic food – If you've ever had a strongly flavored meal or gotten food stuck in your teeth, you understand the urge to go to the bathroom and give your teeth a nice post-meal brushing. You'd think this would be a good thing to do for your teeth, but you may be hurting your teeth instead of helping them – brushing your teeth after eating acidic food (like lemons) speeds up the corrosive effect, possibly damaging enamel and the layers beneath. Instead, wait 30 minutes to an hour before giving your teeth a brush.
2. Make your small snack bigger – You may think that eating small amounts of food for a snack is better for your health and weight, but it may be making you hungrier. When you eat small amounts of carbohydrates, your blood sugar spikes and your body starts craving more carbs, which often leads to eating more to get rid of the hunger pangs. Instead of a small snack pack, try something protein-heavy, like low-fat cheese or peanut butter, combined with fruit or veggies for a snack.
3. Feeling bloated? Drink more water – When your body feels bloated and puffy, putting more liquid in your stomach often seems like the last thing you want to do. But water relieves the causes of most bloating, which include high-fiber diets and dehydration. Water helps dissolve fiber and relieve related bloating. The puffiness that comes from dehydration is caused by your body clinging to the water that is available to it; drinking more brings the bloating and puffiness down.

For more info, contact Wellsource at 800-533-9355.

Health Tips for Employees Who Spend Their Day at a Desk

Do you spend all day sitting at a desk? If you do, your posture and sitting habits may be having a negative impact on your health. Next time you're at your desk, try these worksite wellness habits to make sure you're not causing your body harm when you're at work.

• Check your eye line – One of the best ways to make sure you're sitting with good posture is to check your eye line. If you use a computer, the top of your monitor should be level with your eyes when you are looking straight ahead. If your computer is too low, you need to raise your computer so that your neck and back aren't bent in an unhealthy position.
• Use a supportive chair – The chair you use can have a big impact on your posture. A good chair should have armrests so that the weight of your arms doesn't compress your spine, and should be the right height to make your legs sit at a 45-degree angle when your feet are flat on the ground.
• Make sure your desk is the right height – Another important factor in sitting properly is using a desk that is the right height. Your desk should be high enough that your hands sit in a neutral position (not bent up or down).
• Try alternative work stations –Trying out different types of workstations can be a great way to improve posture and overall health for people who have trouble sitting at a desk. Desks tall enough for standing, switching out chairs for exercise balls or ergonomic office equipment, and other similar alternative workstation ideas are all worth trying.

Contact Wellsource today at 800-533-9355 for more great health tips and wellness ideas.

More Tips for Getting the Most from Your Corporate Wellness Program

A worksite wellness program takes a big investment of time and manpower to get off the ground, which means that companies should want as many of their employees to get involved as possible. In order to make sure all the work that goes into putting your company's wellness program into place pays off, keep these helpful tips in mind:

1. Make it easy to get involved – Corporate wellness programs are a good thing for employees and their health, but making it challenging for them to take part in one is a barrier that will stop many of them from getting involved. If employees have to jump through a lot of hoops just to register for a program or be eligible for its incentives and rewards, many won't take the time to do so. Getting involved with your corporate wellness program should be as painless and easy as possible.
2. Use employees as ambassadors – One of the best ways to inspire people to take part in something is to get their peers to encourage them. If your company has employees who are active and enthusiastic about your company's health initiatives, they should be encouraged to tell other employees about the benefits. Whether that means having them speak in meetings, or just encouraging them to talk about the program with others, bringing in employees to be the program's boosters can be one of the most powerful recruitment tools your company has.
3. Don't be afraid to change things – Sometimes companies are afraid to change things that aren't working about their corporate wellness program, or to introduce new ideas once the program is already in place. But fixing problems and introducing new ideas is a great way to perfect a health program, and to keep employees engaged.

Want more tips and info? Contact us today at 800-533-9355.

Tips for Getting the Most from Your Corporate Wellness Program

Company wellness programs are a proven way to improve productivity, happiness, and the overall health of a company. But in order to get the best results from your company's health initiatives, the program needs to be one that employees can get excited about and want to participate in. In this post, we'll talk about some of the ways you can tailor your company's wellness program to get the best results.

• Get leadership involved – The point of a corporate wellness program is to inspire employees to improve their health and lifestyle practices. In order for that to happen, employees need to get excited about the idea. One of the best ways to do this is to get company leadership involved. When the heads of the company are noticeably excited about wellness, employees are more likely to be inspired to get involved themselves.
• Tailor the incentives – Offering employees incentives and rewards for taking part in a wellness program is a tried and true method of improving participation in company health initiatives, but only if the incentives are ones that employees want. In order to provide employees with incentives that inspire them, find out what rewards they want and consider worth working toward. Whether it's bonuses, tickets to local events, or even just an office party, offering employees incentives that they actually want is a key part of organizing an effective corporate wellness program.
• Celebrate the successes – "Improving wellness" can be a vague concept that is hard for people to get all that excited about. It's much easier to grasp concrete examples and individual success stories. By highlighting the success and life changes of employees who take part in the program, your company can give other employees an inspirational goal to work toward.

Want more info on corporate wellness? Contact us today at 800-533-9355.

Interface engines: fueling interoperability

Interface engines are largely hidden to healthcare practitioners, but they can be vital to the exchange of healthcare data. Among the benefits of a good HL7 engine is its ability to function as a nerve center, overseeing all the pathways your data is taking.

When a hospital interfaces with an imaging provider, for instance, it needs to be able to handle multimedia data and integrate it into a variety of workflows.

A recent successful HL7 go-live with Radiology and Imaging, Inc. (Springfield, MA) was a reminder of the essential role an interface engine plays in the effort to achieve interoperability. And since there is no such thing as a plug-and-play interface, an HL7 go-live inevitably requires fully-customized Visual Basic Scripting (VBS). Each project has its unique contours that can be addressed through VB scripts.

In our work with RII, scripting included:

• Automated email notification of team members when a message is fails or is missing expected elements
• Custom routing and filters to match each facility precisely to the HL7 messages and fields it specifies
• Making use of crosswalk tables to translate codes across different systems

On this project, we handled a full menu of data types, including orders via Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE), lab results and routing of data to an HIE. Iterative testing and customization was required, to go along with constant sharing of expertise. Detailed but parsimonious scripts were put in place to handle the range of client use cases and continued testing took place to identify and account for these scenarios.

No use case is too trivial to ignore as we jump over the testing hurdles needed to move into production.

After successful testing and launch, we also complete a detailed schematic in Visio. Once it all hangs together – and we can navigate test scenarios to the finish line every time  –the interface will stand up to a production environment.

✦✦✦

Bringing all of your interfaces under the sway of an engine cuts down immensely on system complexity. DHIT is the exclusive North American partner for the HL7Connect engine, which enables us to take advantage of a number of key features to reduce our clients’ interface headaches:

• Reconciliation of HL7 formats from various sending/receiving modules 
• Simple browser-based screens for interface management
• Handling of TCP/IP, web services, FTP and file-based protocols 
• Conversion between HL7 and other data formats
• Storage of data in SQL DB, with message editor that allows for viewing, downloading, tabulation and re-transmission of messages

See our HL7 Solutions for more information.

Is Dehydration Affecting Productivity at Your Workplace?

Do you or the people you work with ever start feeling slow and tired toward the end of the workday? If your workplace is regularly hit with a 3 p.m. slump, it may be more than just tiredness that’s causing it. Rather than just being a sign of too little sleep or boredom, it may be a sign that the people in your workplace are dehydrated.

Many people assume that dehydration is only caused by physical exhaustion and extreme heat. But you don’t have to be physically active all day to suffer from dehydration. Many people who work desk jobs simply forget to drink enough water, or drink sodas and energy drinks instead. As a result, lots of office workers start feeling the effects of not having enough water in their bodies, the longer the day goes on, leading to tiredness, inability to concentrate, and other productivity-sapping symptoms.

Here are some steps that can be taken to ensure everyone is getting their minimum daily water needs met at work:

• Make sure employees have access to fresh filtered water: If your workplace has a water cooler, employees are more likely to drink the minimum amount of water they need in a day.
• Encourage employees to bring their own water bottles: Adults should be drinking between 8-10 cups of water a day. To put that another way, that’s the same as drinking three 16 oz. water bottles during the workday. By encouraging employees to bring their own water bottles to work, and letting them fill up at the company water cooler, they’ll be more likely to drink a healthy amount of water every day.
  

For more effective corporate wellness tips, contact Wellsource today at 800-533-9355.

Companies Make Corporate Wellness a Priority

What are the real benefits of a corporate wellness program? Traditionally, many businesses have looked at their wellness programs as a secondary concern compared to their main business goals, a way to help out employees and encourage them to live healthier lives, and not much else. But recent studies examining the long-term effects of employee wellness programs have many managers and HR representatives paying attention and reconsidering the amount of attention they give their health awareness efforts.

According to a recent study, Johnson & Johnson's employee health initiatives have had a profound positive impact on the company's overall culture and health:

• Between 1995 and 2010, the number of Johnson & Johnson employees who smoke declined by two thirds.
• During the same time period, the number of company employees suffering from high blood pressure and physical inactivity also declined by more than 50%.
• Company leaders estimate that wellness programs saved the company $250 million on healthcare related costs during the past decade.
• Between 2002 and 2008, the company saw a return of $2.71 for every dollar spent on employee wellness programs.

In other words, investing in programs aiming to maintain employee's physical, mental, and emotional health saved the company far more than it invested in those programs. It's long been known that healthier employees get more work done and cost their employers less money, but seeing the actual amounts that companies save through employee wellness initiatives provides inarguable proof of just how much good corporate health programs can do for employees and businesses.

To learn more about Wellsource's employee health programs, contact us today at 800-533-9355.

Sources

1. https://hbr.org/2010/12/whats-the-hard-re