Insurance giant Humana claims that its wellness program has improved employee health and productivity, as well as saved the company big bucks in health care costs.
Humana employees who took part in a rewards-oriented wellness program run by Vitality, a major wellness vendor, missed six fewer hours of work during a three year period than workers who did not participate in the initiative, the company announced.
In addition, Humana reported that program participants' health costs decreased 6 percent in the first year of the program and 10 percent by the final year. In contrast, non-participants' health costs increased 17 percent by the third year of the study.
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Finally, those engaged in the wellness initiative had 56 percent less trips to the emergency room and 37 percent less hospital visits.
To Humana and Vitality, the case for wellness programs is clear.
"Through multi-year study results, HumanaVitality has proven to be an effective investment in building a healthier and more productive workforce," said Beth Bierbower, president of Group Segment for Humana.
At least one prominent wellness critic dismissed the results.
"Vitality must have done a much better job for Humana than for its own parent company, Discovery, where BMI increased and eating habits deteriorated, after implementation of the Vitality program," Al Lewis, CEO of Quizzify, a company that focuses on health literacy, said in an email to BenefitsPro.
Lewis, who ruthlessly mocks the wellness industry in the press and on his own blog, argues that no companies have ever been able to prove that an incentive-based wellness program actually produces a financial return on investment for the employer. Studies that suggest wellness programs have produced savings often exaggerate their impact by only focusing on the employees who took part in the program, he has argued.
As Lewis and others have cast doubt on the financial benefits of wellness programs, companies that support such initiatives have largely recast the goal of the programs as improving worker morale and productivity, rather than as a way to reduce health care costs.
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