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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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Following on our podcast yesterday with with Chris Calitz, Director of the American Heart Association’s Center for Workplace Health Research and Evaluation (Podcast: For Health, Work is Where the Heart Is), a new report from the American Heart Association makes the direct link between employee health and reduced corporate cost:

“Study: Healthiest employees cost companies half the healthcare costs.”

The post states: “The healthiest employees of Baptist Health South Florida incurred thousands of dollars less in healthcare costs and were less likely to be hospitalized or visit an emergency department than employees with moderate or poor health.”

It continues: “The study offers a compelling business case for employers who offer health insurance to invest in comprehensive workplace health and well-being programs and policies, said Eduardo Sanchez, M.D., the American Heart Association’s chief medical officer for prevention and a study co-author.”

The study was published by the Mayo Clinic and is titled “Favorable Cardiovascular Health Is Associated With Lower Health Care Expenditures and Resource Utilization in a Large US Employee Population.”

The participants and methods: “Employees of Baptist Health South Florida participated in a health risk assessment from January 1 through September 30, 2014. Information on dietary patterns, physical activity, blood pressure, blood glucose level, total cholesterol level, and smoking were collected. Participants were categorized into CVH [cardiovascular health] profiles using the American Heart Association's ideal CVH construct as optimal (6-7 metrics), moderate (3-5 metrics), and low (0-2 metrics). Two-part econometric models were used to analyze health care expenditures.”

The connection between strong employee health and reduced employer costs was noted as well by Khurram Nasir, M.D., a cardiologist and study senior author.

The American Heart Association writes: “Optimizing the cardiovascular health of employees may translate into millions of dollars in healthcare savings for employers, said Nasir, also research director for the center for prevention and wellness at Baptist Health South Florida, based in Miami.”

Nasir added that “a significant portion of these healthcare costs were from conditions that could be prevented by better lifestyle choices.”

Our podcast guest and a study co-author Chris Calitz, also comments in the AHA post: ““These findings demonstrate that the Life’s Simple 7 framework is effective for employers to evaluate the cardiovascular health of their workforce and to engage employees to reach their optimal health.”

For your convenience, we're reposting the podcast here:

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