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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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Last week we highlighted the financial benefits that can accrue through a well-run workplace wellness program that helps employees manage emotional wellness — stress, depression, or other mood disorders.

The insights are outlined in the Integrated Benefits Institute report on “Health and Productivity Impact of Chronic Conditions: Depression and Other Mood Disorders.”

As the report states: “Helping employees manage chronic illnesses remains one of the most viable strategies for reducing employers’ healthcare and disability costs. IBI’s Health and Productivity Impact of Chronic Conditions series uses high-quality data to model healthcare, illness absence (i.e., sick days) and disability costs for populations of employees across different industries. The results provide a scalable cost benchmark that employers and their supplier partners can use to assess the potential savings from reductions in the prevalence of a condition, costs of treatments, and illness-related absences and disability leaves.”

Indeed, this chart that is part of the report makes clear the “Total Costs of Mood disorders in a Workforce.”

chart workplace wellness

 

Emotional Wellness; Workplace Interventions

But what is the “Evidence for Workplace Interventions?”

According to the report: “Several sources offer good starting points for crafting strategies to manage the full costs of depression. Examples include:”

  • “Research suggests that medication and psychotherapy is effective in 70%-80% of depression cases. However, depression tends to be underdiagnosed and undertreated. Providing access to employee assistance programs (EAP) and employing a mental health screener (such as the PHQ-9) that employees can discuss with their regular health care providers may help connect at-risk employees to beneficial care resources.”
  • “Occupational therapy has been shown to reduce the duration of temporary disability from work for depression.”
  • “Depression management can improve employee’s effective hours worked as a result of better retention and fewer absences.”

This just may be why the report's overview states: “Mood disorders, most commonly diagnosed as depression, not only degrade the quality of employees’ lives — these disorders have business costs for employers and the economy at-large.”

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