My best HR management idea: A wellness program that gets real results

HR manager W.D. Glisson wanted to institute a wellness program that actually led to some real benefits for the company. Here’s how he did it.
His story:
Almost out of desperation over ballooning healthcare costs, we started thinking about a wellness program for our employees.
The drawbacks? There were several. For instance:
• There was a chance few or no employees would take advantage of the program. So to speak, you’d throw a party that no one attends.
• Only healthy employees would take advantage. The people who really needed the benefits would opt for the doughnuts in the break room instead.
• The program might be too scattershot. We could end up offering remedies for health problems that didn’t exist in our organization.
Well, at least we understood the obstacles. Here’s how we finally cleared them:
Privacy rules get in the way
First, we wanted to understand the health problems we were dealing with.To do that, we contracted with a local hospital to do an employee health screening. This is where things really got sticky for us.
You’ve probably heard about all the new privacy rules, particularly regarding medical records. Because of those rules, we couldn’t just pull individual screenings and find out that, say, Bob needed help controlling his weight or Susie had smoking-related ailments.
Plus, we were pretty sure that even if the law allowed us to look at individual records, our employees wouldn’t be too thrilled about it.
We talked to the screening people about it and came up with a solution to the problem. While they couldn’t give us individual records, they could give us a composite record.
So, for instance, we’d know what percentage of our employees were overweight, had high blood pressure, were near danger levels of cholesterol, and so on.
They come to the party
With that information, the hospital that did the screening worked with us to design a wellness program that met the needs of most of our employees.
We announced the opening of the program and its details, and waited to see if we got any participation. The signup rate: 75%. Pretty good.
The results: After several consecutive years of double-digit increases in our health premiums, our rate increase dipped under 10% this year because our employees needed less medical care.
When we look around and see what’s happening with other organizations’ premiums, we feel confident we took the right approach to a wellness program.
(W.D. Glisson, VP for HR, Frederick, MD)