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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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Yesterday we reported on a new study from JAMA Cardiology that heightens the focus on why a well-run workplace wellness plan that helps employees manage obesity is key to improving employee health and reducing employer health costs. Today we take a deeper dive.

The report is titled Association of Body Mass Index With Lifetime Risk of Cardiovascular Disease and Compression of Morbidity. According to the authors, the study’s importance is that “prior studies have demonstrated lower all-cause mortality in individuals who are overweight compared with those with normal body mass index (BMI), but whether this may come at the cost of greater burden of cardiovascular disease (CVD) is unknown.”

The report concludes: “In this study, obesity was associated with shorter longevity and significantly increased risk of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality compared with normal BMI. Despite similar longevity compared with normal BMI, overweight was associated with significantly increased risk of developing CVD at an earlier age, resulting in a greater proportion of life lived with CVD morbidity.” In other words, as MedPage Today reports: “Obesity was tied to a shorter lifespan, and a significantly increased risk of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality compared with normal BMI.”

Deeper Dive Heightens Engagement Drive

But a deeper dive into the study reveals even more important data — including on costs. These facts and findings can help with engagement or even plan design around a well-run workplace wellness program:

The economic implications of direct and indirect medical costs of the overweight and obesity epidemic are enormous, and total health care costs attributable to overweight and obesity are estimated to exceed $800 billion by 2030 if current trends persist.

These trends are concerning for very likely future increases in the population-level burden of CVD among adults, including a trend for CVD events to occur at younger ages.

Another key conclusion — and a recent by biometric and other screening is often part of a well-run workplace wellness program: Catching the disease early matters.

The authors write: “Taking a life course perspective, we observe that the obesity paradox (ie, greater longevity after diagnosis of CVD for those who are overweight and obese) appears largely to be caused by earlier diagnosis of CVD.”

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