All the boxes are checked: Workers who are rewarded for participating in wellness programs often practice healthier behaviors, are less likely to experience chronic conditions, have lower health care costs – and are more productive at work.

At least that’s the case for Humana’s wellness and rewards program Go365, detailed in the Go365 five-year study.

Data from July 2011 through June 2016 was collected through Go365 health assessments and biometric screenings of 10,598 Humana employees participating in the program. The first two years were used as a baseline period for the study, and the last three years made up the analysis period.

Improvements were seen in virtually all metrics analyzed.

“There was an increase in the percentage of members who reported healthier lifestyle choices and received clinical results showing a healthy range for different risk factors linked to chronic conditions,” writes the author, Jaco Conradie, an associate director of financial analytics on the Humana Wellness Solutions product team.

Participants between the third and fifth years were more likely to report eating more fruits and vegetables, exercising more a week, experiencing lower levels of stress and being non-smokers.

Also during the latter years, biometric data showed that members were more likely to have healthy ranges of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, blood glucose, blood pressure and triglycerides.

Lower risk factors paid off: “Higher engagement in Go365 was linked to minimized cost increases in health care, as well as fewer emergency room visits and hospital admissions,” Conradie writes.

In the fifth year, employees who were highly engaged in the program on average paid $116 (or 22 percent) less each month in health care costs than employees who were deemed as “low-engaged.”

Moreover, highly engaged employees in the fifth year on average had 35 percent fewer emergency room visits and 30 percent fewer hospital admissions than low-engaged employees.

To measure productivity, Humana split up the employees by their Go365 engagement level and looked at the number of “unhealthy days” they reported in an annual well-being survey, a metric used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

By the fifth year, highly engaged members reported 55 percent fewer Unhealthy Days than low-engaged members.

“Higher engagement in Go365 was associated with fewer Unhealthy Days, which can reflect productivity, absenteeism and presenteeism — when employees are physically present at work but not working at full performance,” Conradie writes.

Overall, the five-year study shows a link between long-term engagement in Go365 with employee health, improvements in health care cost savings and productivity, he writes.

“This study’s results continue to show a positive correlation between engagement in the Go365 program and lower healthcare costs, absenteeism and biometric risk factors,” Conradie writes. “There also seems to be a close response relationship between engagement in the program and health outcomes, with high-engaged members exhibiting the best results, followed by medium-engaged members and low-engaged members having the worst results.”

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Highly engaged employees in long-term wellness program healthier, more productive: Humana

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