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Workplace Wellness Lab delivers leading insights, ideas and information on wellness, health management, and healthy living.

Our goal is simple: Workplace Wellness Lab provides regular and better information as an important path to create healthy individual outcomes, while helping change health care in America.

By connecting the audiences that matter – consultants, corporate executives, policymakers, thought leaders, journalists, customers, and more – we establish a positive, substantive, and influential voice within the wellness industry that makes the case that:

    • Left unchecked, current trends in health spend and outcomes are unsustainable.
    • Given that half the healthcare dollars in this country are incurred by employers, well-executed preventive care health management programs in the worksite are clearly enduring and valuable, helping drive improved workplace environments and individual outcomes.
    • Industry coherence around private sector innovation to drive effective health management programs is economically vital, given what’s possible in a spend category that is arguably one of the greatest challenges in America today.

Workplace Wellness Lab comes at this challenge principally from the employer point of view: What are the credible and demonstrated best practices in preventive care to structure programs that have an enduring impact? How can the impact be made explicit, as something that is both the right thing to do and a proactive business initiative that lowers the cost of care, as experienced by both employers and employees?

And Workplace Wellness Lab goes beyond the workplace. It’s a robust platform filled with ideas and insights from those that influence how employers think about this opportunity: research organizations, non-profits, think tanks and more.

From an editorial point of view, great ideas can come from anywhere. With that philosophy in mind, we will combine our own original content with other content across the web. We organize the content, with a view to making it as simple and useful as possible.

All content will be sourced. If we found it somewhere, we’ll tell you where we got — and how to get to that site yourself.

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Screen Shot 2014-05-05 at 11.53.23 AMCan healthcare analytic tools help employers leverage their own medical claims data and make conclusions around costs and plans to drive improved health outcomes?

At the recent, Human Resource Executive Health & Benefits Leadership Conference, Ronald S. Leopold, National Practice Leader of Health Outcomes, Willis Towers Watson, discussed the topic. The presentation was titled “Doing the Math: Data-Driven Health Outcome Strategies for Employers.” The questions:

“As employer plan sponsors take on greater ownership of their medical-cost exposure, the need to harness healthcare claims data has never been stronger. With a projected increase in medical and pharmacy costs in 2016, the eventual arrival of the Cadillac Tax and the growing shift to self-funding, employers are asking for data-driven solutions to offset increases in coverage costs. New healthcare analytic tools are now allowing employers to leverage their own medical claims data sets and benchmark cost trends, utilization patterns, burden of disease and much more.”

The HRE Daily blog reported some of the learnings. One covered being prepared as, according to Leopold, “we see healthcare costs starting to trend slightly upward.”

HRE writes: “For employers, being ready for this uptick entails making efforts to lower employee health risks—implementing effective wellness programs and making plan-design changes that encourage employees to become more responsible for their healthcare, for example—and, in turn, lower healthcare costs.”

The piece adds: “Leopold urged attendees to ‘demand the story' beyond typical metrics such as average employee hospital stays and number of employees with a given disease or condition, for instance.”

Leopold is quoted: “Look at data and use algorithms—which you in HR may not have, but carriers will have, and some consultants will have, and data aggregators will have—to determine [your population’s] health risks… This is practicing predictive analytics. Then we can see what’s likely to happen in the future … and we’ll get better results.”

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