Company wellness programs for employees that include complementary medicine features like yoga can benefit bottom lines, according to Mark Bertolini, chief executive of the health insurer Aetna.
When Aetna determined in 2010 that its workers with the highest levels of stress were costing the company $2,000 more each year than co-workers, the company created an initiative to promote yoga and meditation, Bertolini said at the Third Metric conference co-sponsored by The Huffington Post in New York last week.
The results include improvements in heart rates and increased productivity, and help Aetna reduce its employee health benefit costs by 7 percent in 2012, he said.
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Workplace programs to promote employee wellness by using financial incentives to discourage tobacco use and encourage exercise alongside health insurance benefits designed to increase the use of preventive medical services like cholesterol tests havegrown increasingly common as companies seek to reduce health care spending.
President Barack Obama's health care reform law includes provisions intended to broaden access to such benefits, which may make them even more widely used.
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