How Workplace Health Programs Lower Healthcare Costs

One of the main benefits of employee wellness plans for businesses is that they have the potential to save lots of money. Those businesses that haven't instituted wellness programs tend to look at the cost of doing so, but overlook the ways that those same programs can help them save far more money, time, and resources than it takes to run them.

How do wellness programs lower healthcare costs? Here are just a few of the ways:

• Most chronic diseases are preventable – According to the CDC, 75% of all healthcare costs are due to chronic illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer. Although most of these diseases can be prevented or managed with proper diet and exercise, many workers do not have the health education or the support network necessary to adopt the healthy lifestyle needed to do so. Corporate wellness programs provide that education and support, and can therefore help prevent the development of chronic disease, thereby reducing overall healthcare costs.
• Healthier employees cost less – In a study performed by doctors Richard Milani and Lavie, 185 employees at a single worksite were given cardiac rehabilitation and exercise training. By the time the study was over, 57% of employees who took part were downgraded from high risk to low risk in health factors that included body fat, blood pressure, and other important indicators. Medical claims per employee after the study declined by $1,421, which lead to a total of $6 saved for every $1 the company invested in employee wellness.
• Wellness programs come with tax incentives and grants – Businesses aren't the only organizations concerned with the growing cost of healthcare. Because of the enormous cost of healthcare on the federal budget, recent healthcare legislation has included tax incentives, grants, and other programs for businesses that institute workplace wellness programs. In addition to making employees healthier, happier, and more productive, employee health programs can also help businesses earn some extra money from Uncle Sam.

Want to learn more? Contact us today at 800-533-9355.

Sources

• http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2013/09/12/five-reasons-corporate-wellness-is-more-important-than-ever/
• https://hbr.org/2010/12/whats-the-hard-return-on-employee-wellness-programs

Corporate Wellness Improves Productivity

Corporate wellness programs aren't just good for employees – they're good for their employers, too. According to recent studies, health initiatives can greatly improve a worksite's productivity and time management.

• 35% of employees said they missed fewer workdays thanks to the wellness program offered by their workplace. Only 25% of workers said that they disagreed that their wellness program led to fewer missed days.
• 52% of respondents to the study said that participating in workplace health programs made them more productive and energetic at work. Only 12% said they felt that workplace health initiatives did not improve overall energy and productivity at their worksite.
• 55% of employees felt that wellness activities offered by their employer improved their overall health, and decreased their risk of sickness and other health issues.

Devoting resources to employees’ physical health isn't the only way businesses are improving productivity, either. Wellness programs designed to help employees cope with depression and mental health issues have also been shown to have a positive impact. An article by the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine reported the following results from a 16 month study tracking the progress of employees with depression who took part in a Workplace Health Initiative (WHI), which allowed them to call a hotline and make one-hour therapy appointments every two weeks:

• Employees who took part in the WHI reported that their ability to create original material improved by 10.9%.
• The same group of employees reported their ability to interact with others improved by 11.8%.
• The employees with depression reported that their time management skills were impaired 44.9% of the time before being given access to the WHI, and fell to only 26.8% of the time, after the program started, and improvement of 18.1%.
• The same study tracked employees with depression who managed their own care, who reported no serious improvements in any of the above categories.

Learn more about Wellsource's corporate health programs by calling 800-533-9355 today.

Sources

• http://www.hallmarkbusinessconnections.com/article-study-shows-companies-with-wellness-programs-get-more-out-of-workers
• http://www.hallmarkbusinessconnections.com/article-employees-who-suffer-from-depression-respond-to-call-in-initiatives

Interoperability in Action Post #2: A Tale of Two Connectathons

HL7 International held Connectathon 9 in Paris on May 10 and followed up with a FHIR Clinician

Connect-a-thon on May 15. Both events came at the challenge of interoperability from different angles.

Credit: Yann Caradec

Connectathon 9 had 4 separate themes:

·         Basic patient management

·         Version 2 mapping to FHIR messages

·         Financial Resources

·         Terminology Services

Clinician Connect-a-thon, meanwhile, featured two streams:

·         A “Clinician challenge stream” that tackled the “clinical adequacy, validity, accuracy and reliability of the FHIR clinical resources,” using different test scenarios

·         Testing of FHIR clinical resources through the following environment: http://clinfhir.com/

There were plenty of threads to pick up in the discussion around these events. One of the most interesting was a comment from Grahame Grieve (the ‘man of FHIR’), as captured on the FHIRplace blog:

The FHIR registry is on top of my most-important, damn-if-I-don’t task list.

Users of FHIR need to know if profiles and extensions exist already for the standard to be truly interoperable. It will be fascinating to see how this unfolds – including where this registry (or registries) ultimately lives and who will be its overseer.

Real-world scenarios

A registry is vitally important to the standardization of FHIR, but so is the real-world clinical perspective.

In an effort to ground FHIR testing in real-world clinical scenarios, Clinical Connectathon participants worked from clinical storyboards and scripts. These scenarios were provided in plain-language prose and rooted in common occurrences – through a range of clinical settings – that would make demands on FHIR resources or databases.

These storyboards are highly instructive, serving as a window into how interoperability might play out practically through the use of FHIR and also a more generally instructive testing tool. As we test interoperability in our development work, DHIT strives to simulate common use cases that affect patients and physicians. Particularly relevant to our recent work is the immunization storyboard.

The more we can return to the question of “What do physicians and patients need from this technology?” the closer we get to meaningful interoperability. As the Connectathon demonstrates, we should bake this right into our design andtesting.

Extensibility in action

FHIR’s extensibility, at least in theory, allows it to accommodate a wide variety of real-world clinical situations. David Hay, part of the Connectaton planning team, writes over at the ‘Hay on FHIR’ blog: “FHIR has a built-in extension mechanism that allows specific implementations to add the properties they need that are missing from the resources.”

The Registry is the killer app to make these connections. When FHIR knows what to look for, it can rapidly address the demands the clinical world can make on data at rest.

How to Integrate Fitness with Work

One of the latest trends in worksite wellness is finding ways to integrate work and fitness. Here are just some of the steps that businesses big and small are taking to help employees stay active, maintain physical health, and improve productivity:

• Ergonomic work tools – Many traditional office supplies like phones, keyboards, and office chairs aren't designed with long-term health in mind. That means that they can cause serious ailments and physical conditions when used for long periods of time. To combat this, many offices are introducing ergonomically designed supplies, such as phone headsets, ergonomic chair and desk designs, and keyboards that are designed to reduce stress on the wrists.
• Exercise workstations – When employees work at a desk for 8 or more hours a day, getting the right amount of physical activity can be difficult. In order to help employees get the necessary amount of physical activity, some offices are switching out traditional desks and chairs for workstations that incorporate treadmills, exercise balls, and other exercise tools.
• Anti-fatigue mats – Employees with jobs that require them to walk or stand frequently generally get more exercise than their deskbound compatriots. Unfortunately, those jobs can also mean spending long hours standing on uncomfortable surfaces and walking around in shoes that aren't always friendly on the feet. Many offices have started laying anti-fatigue mats on their floors in order to make it easier for employees to stand and walk on them without wearing out their legs and feet. These mats help more work get done, and help employees get more activity during the day.
• Workplace personal trainers – Another step that some businesses are taking is providing their employees with access to personal trainers, either for free or at discount prices. Even short lessons with a personal trainer can help employees adopt healthy habits like improving posture, getting more exercise, and improving their diet.

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

Interoperability in Action Post #1: Immunization Records

Interoperability is a mammoth, catchall topic on the minds of healthcare IT stakeholders everywhere. For most providers, however, the term remains an abstraction. For patients, it likely has little meaning. What matters for both is not some lofty ideal of “interoperability,” but rather improved health and health care experience.

What does interoperability look like when it works to assist providers to better serve their patients? In this series of posts, Dynamic Health IT will look at a few concrete examples of breaking down barriers to health information exchange. Like any physical engineering project, many parts of it are far-from-glamorous. But doing the grunt work is essential to inching closer to fully portable, patient-centered health data.

Making immunization records accessible
Immunization records are historically one of those essential pieces of health information that patients and caregivers have had difficulty tracking down and toting around to each new provider. Providers, meanwhile, often lack assurances that they are seeing a reliable immunization history. The idea behind connecting providers to state immunization registries is to make sure patients receive needed immunizations in a timely manner, removing the headaches of scattered records.

Credit: NIH

In practice, each state has different data exchange needs and policies. Providers – often small private practices – must work with EHRs or practice management companies to navigate the requirements. For the last year, Dynamic Health IT has been increasingly involved in applying our knowledge of HL7 data, information exchange methods and development to bridge this gap.

In Texas, we worked to establish an HL7 interface and secure FTP connection to the state. Through iterative testing, we then adjusted EHR output from the client system to fit state HL7 requirements.

This test case then came to serve as the template for future implementations. Drawing on experience with HL7 interface design and knowledge of other state specifications, we have worked to create a “master message” generated by the EHR. Fields that are optional in some states will be ignored, while in other cases our HL7 interfaces will make tweaks so that these messages will pass testing and be submitted efficiently through any transport method.

In Georgia – whose immunization registry bears the clever acronym “GRITS” – we wrote a web service to pick up immunization messages dropped from an HL7 interface into folders. The web service knows the client credentials and expectations from the Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) on the GRITs site. The two sides talk to each other broker the exchange of information, with our web service pulling down acknowledgments of received messages.

We’re working to ensure that any physician or patient can reach immunization data where and when they need it. More patients have access to an easily-accessible clearinghouse of data reachable from anywhere on the internet. Similarly, physicians are gaining access to more complete patient immunization histories (where appropriate and in keeping with norms of patient consent). It’s an ambitious goal, but we look forward to staying in the trenches.

3 Ways to Exercise While Working at Your Desk

An easy way to improve worksite wellness at your workplace is to encourage employees to perform small, low-effort exercises at their desks. Sitting for long periods of time can have a lot of negative health effects on the body, which stretches and exercises like the following can help mitigate: 

1.     Do some leg lifts while sitting – If you spend a lot time sitting in one place at your desk, taking the opportunity to stretch your legs is very important. To give your legs a minor workout while on the clock, lift one of your legs up so that it is extended straight, and hold it in that position for two to three seconds; then lower your leg back down so that your foot hovers just above the floor, and hold that position for the same length of time. Do this 15 times per leg.

2.     Perform some desk squats – Waiting for a particularly slow web page to load? Standing around waiting for paperwork to print? Little moments of downtime like these are the perfect time to get in some one-legged desk squats. Holding on to your desk for support, lift one leg off the ground while slowly lowering your body up and down with the other. Once you've worked out the first leg thoroughly, switch to the other and repeat.

3.     Exercise your core while seated at your desk – The legs aren't the only muscles that need some extra exercise during a long day seated at the desk. To work out your arms and your core, grip the arm rests of your chair firmly and lift your body out of the seat, holding the position for a few seconds, then lower yourself back down, stopping just short of putting your rear back in the seat. Hold that position for a few seconds as well, then repeat. 

Looking for more ways to improve your company's health culture? Speak with a Wellsource representative today by calling 800-533-9355.

Our kind of town: Staying social at HIMSS15

At HIMSS15 in Chicago, there were the usual wall-to-wall session offerings, evening events and impromptu chances to meet with colleagues. Increasingly, there is also a virtual space for engagement running alongside the real-life conference action. While social media can quickly turn into a noisy echo chamber, we found that – with the right approach – it enhanced the conference experience.

In particular, the HIMSS15 App proved to be a powerful tool, rather than a gimmick some feared it might be. It made organizing your schedule and appointments much easier, with the chance to compare agendas and link up with other users – a far cry from scrawling things on the back of business cards and folders. 

If you wanted to meet the people and organizations that were most highly engaged in the conference, you could consult the handy social media leader board.  We had the chance to attend the HIMSS15 Social Media gathering hosted by John Lynn – further evidence this whole thing has moved beyond mere fad. 

Across several platforms (LinkedIn and Twitter, in particular), attendees shared useful, real time information so that we could be in two places at once – especially helpful if you were needed to staff a booth. The rules of engagement are simple: to offer a value proposition (not sales spam) and do it in an interesting way. If you've got followers re-tweeting your up-to-the-minute conference analysis or laughing out loud (with you, hopefully), you’re probably in the right ballpark.

Not all business

We came to HIMSS15 to learn and accomplish a number of business objectives, but conferences - especially in a world-class town like Chicago – aren't all work.

We also enjoyed the serendipity of the conference and city. DHIT team members took part in the HIMSS15 Wellness challenge, tracking the many steps we took to cover the 22 football fields’ worth of exhibition space and sharing our experience with other HIMSS15 app users. Our stay at the newly-opened Virgin Hotel came complete with a ride in a Tesla (at right). We got an up-close look at a Verizon robot designed to facilitate care in immuno-compromised  patient settings. And we got to experience a little bit of the Chicago nightlife.

It all served as a reminder for why we exist as a company – to pursue innovation and have fun doing it.