<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=1602061480087256&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">

R&R Insurance Blog

Reduce Insurance Costs & Increase Employee Productivity

Posted by Shay Sherfinski

Workplace_Wellnessjpg.jpgAccording to a study, 81% of large employers and 49% of small employers offer wellness programs to their employees. Aimed to improve employees’ overall well-being, these programs are often centered around weight loss, smoking cessation, and walking.

Why is it important to promote wellness in the workplace?

Wellness affects your company’s bottom line in many ways—in particular, it can lower health care costs, increase productivity, decrease absenteeism and raise employee morale.

Employees with health risk factors, such as being overweight or smoking, can directly impact insurance costs.  In turn, those employees will pay more for health care than employees with fewer risk factors. Wellness can help employees with high risk factors make the lifestyle changes to improve their quality of life and reduce their health care costs, while also helping employees with fewer risk factors stay healthy. 

What are the benefits of a wellness program?

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) promotes the formation of workplace wellness programs because, according to one of its studies, employees in companies with “a strong culture of health” are three times more likely to actively strive to improve their health.

In addition, wellness programs have shown to directly:

  • Control health insurance costs
  • Reduce Workers’ Compensation and disability costs
  • Increase employee productivity and absenteeism
  • Enhance morale and improve recruiting

Read more about the value a wellness program can provide on your organization and how to lower your insurance costs, or contact Shay Sherfinski.

Topics: Wellness Program, Employee Benefits, Wellness, lower insurance costs, corporate wellness

Does Your Business Have a Wellness Program In Place?

Posted by Bill Katzfey

iStock_000064575089_XXXLarge-1-1Is your organization taking advantage of the numerous ways to save money on health insurance? Are you looking to reduce your insurance premiums?

While there are numerous benefits to implementing and maintaining a robust wellness program, reducing the number of employees who smoke is an important piece of the wellness puzzle. Proactively providing smoking cessation programs will have a direct impact on your health insurance premiums. In addition, smokers commonly have longer recoveries from surgery and often need repeat surgeries which causes work comp claims to skyrocket on individual surgical claims.

The Charolotte Observer recently published an article with examples of doctors refusing to operate on those who smoke. According to research, one study found that smokers who got joint replacement surgery had an 80 percent higher chance than nonsmokers of needing repeat surgery because of complications from infection.

Click here to read the full article.

Are you looking to revamp or jumpstart a wellness program at your organization? Contact me to learn more about the resources R&R has available to assist.

Topics: Wellness, Improve Employee Wellness, corporate wellness

Wellness Programs: ROI No Longer in Dispute

Posted by the knowledge brokers

Workplace_WellnessjpgBuilding a workplace culture of wellness is one of the best things employers can do to boost employee health – and to improve the bottom line.

When employers and workers join forces to battle high healthcare costs, everyone wins. Organizations across the U.S. are making incredible strides to achieve higher productivity, lower absenteeism and reduce claims. People who take a more active role in managing their own health enjoy the payoffs, too, in quality of life and cost savings.

Research shows that health risks are directly related to costs. As the risks increase, so do the costs. Heart disease, obesity and other costly conditions can be prevented when people engage in healthy behaviors both short term and long term.

Wellness Statistics:

  • For each employee who loses low-risk status, health costs go up $350/year. If they regain their low-risk status, they save $150/year.
  • High BMI individuals cost an average of $2326 (1996 dollars) more in annual health claims compared to healthy BMI individuals.
  • High-risk health plan members cost approximately $2000 over the average for annual medical claims.
  • High-risk employees (5+ risk factors) between ages 35-65 have medical claim costs of $3007-$4182 higher/year compared to low-risk employees in the same age group.

The most effective way to increase the proportion of employees in the low-risk category is to keep them from developing risk factors.

Encouraging physical activity and balanced nutrition, along with other healthy behaviors, is central to any health promotion program. Employees spend a significant portion of their waking hours on the job. Employers can significantly influence lifestyles by developing worksite programs to maintain healthy behaviors.

Creating a healthy workplace can involve 4 primary areas:

  1. Environment – Healthy food, smoke-free facility, physical activity and injury prevention policies.
  2. Programs – Health promotions, recreation programs, employee assistance programs and coaching.
  3. Culture – Incentive systems, role models, education.
  4. Policies – Medical coverage for preventive care, flextime, guidelines to monitor and reduce stress.

A review of 42 published studies on worksite health promotion programs shows these averages:

  • 28% reduction in sick leave absenteeism
  • 26% reduction in health costs
  • 30% reduction in workers’ compensation and disability management claim costs
  • $5.93 –to-$1 savings-to-cost ratio

Implementing strategies to help workers stay healthy is critical to controlling costs. At R&R, we take wellness to a whole new level. Wellness programs will increase the health and longevity of employees and their families –which means that businesses can have a lot of control over their health insurance costs and the productivity of their employees – control that they don’t know they have. At R&R Insurance, we call this program WellCompForLife!

Join the WellCompForLife discussion on LinkedIn!

For more information about WellCompForLife, about self-funding your health insurance plan, health care reform or basic employee benefits questions, contact knowledgebroker Laura Stehno.

Topics: Employee Benefits, Wellness, Laura Stehno, worksite health, wellness roi, bmi, WellCompForLife, wellness programs, healthy workplace, corporate wellness