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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.

We also welcome your comments — criticisms, ideas, and, yes, we take compliments, too! Have a thought of what you’d like to see — or see something you think others should know — drop us a line.

Thanks for visiting – and please come back again!

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One of the biggest drivers of chronic disease — and of outsized health costs for businesses — is smoking. That's why most well-run workplace workplace wellness programs make anti-smoking campaigns a part of member outreach and engagement.

Now the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that smoking statistics are improving for certain populations.

Time reports that “Smoking rates among U.S. adults have hit an all-time low, new estimates say.”

It continues: “Approximately 14% of American adults said they were smokers last year, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). While that’s still a significant number, encompassing more than 30 million Americans, it’s down from 16% the year before and roughly 20% in 2006. It’s also a significant drop-off from rates recorded around 50 years ago, which topped 40% by some estimates.”

The bad news, however, and the information that location-specific employers may want to focus on: Smoking rates remain higher outside of metropolitan regions.

Writes MedPage Today: “The prevalence of current cigarette smoking among adults not living in metropolitan areas was nearly double that of adults living in urban areas with populations of 1 million of more (21.5% versus 11.4%). People not living in metropolitan areas were more likely than those living in both large and small urban areas to be current cigarette smokers.”

This type of information is useful for workplace wellness programs that may consider engagement efforts customized to location.

Indeed, MedPage offers additional information on the breakdown of smoking rates that also can be useful for workplace wellness leaders:

“Men were more likely than women to be current smokers in 2017 (15.8% versus 12.2%), and they were also more likely to report being former smokers (25.7% versus 19.5%). Women were more likely than men to report never having smoked cigarettes (68.3% versus 58.5%).”

Said Paul Billings, American Lung Association senior vice president: “While the progress is welcome … much more needs to be done to ensure all Americans benefit from policies designed to address tobacco use.”

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