As employers consider investing in employee wellness programs, many want to know there will be a positive return on investment (ROI), typically calculated as a ratio of health plan dollars saved per dollar invested. Dragon Age 2 Dlc Decrypter Online. A 2010, published in the journal Health Affairs, found that the average medical cost savings per dollar invested in wellness programs was $3.27. The report's finding was based on an analysis of more than 20 peer-reviewed ROI studies. Few other health-related investments come close to having this much ROI support.

Most analyses of workplace wellness programs focus on hard-dollar returns. A version of this article appeared in the December 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review. Aug 22, 2017 About four-fifths of U.S. Employers with more than 1,000 employees offer workplace health and wellness programs. Some hail workplace wellness programs.

Other Views on ROI A 2012 report by the not-for-profit International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans, A Closer Look: Wellness ROI, similarly found that most North American employers that have analyzed the ROI of their wellness programs have found $1 to $3 decreases in their overall health care costs for every dollar spent. See the SHRM Online article “.” Moreover, lowering health risk factors to their theoretical minimums, if this were possible, would reduce average annual health care costs per working-age adult by 18.4 percent, according to published in the January 2013 issue of the Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine. Research Challenges So, why is the ROI of wellness still controversial and why are many employers still hesitating to invest? Despite the favorable review, the 20 studies in the Harvard/ Health Affairs report varied widely in methods and rigor, and none met all the criteria for a gold-standard randomized controlled trial that would definitively answer the key question of whether the lower health care costs for employees exposed to a wellness program were caused by the program. Unlike lab rats, employees can’t be randomly assigned to treatment and control groups in a sterile environment where even the white-coated lab technicians don’t know which group the rat is in. Because a gold standard study isn’t feasible, researchers have had to resort to less definitive “quasi-experimental” approaches.

Current industry evaluation experts recommend a pre-/post-measurement, participant vs. Non-participant design with statistical adjustment to account for baseline differences across different groups. This research jargon is referred to as a “differences-in-differences” approach and simply means researchers compare medical cost trends of employees participating in the wellness program to trends of employees who don’t participate, while using complicated statistics to try to overcome a problem of “selection bias” that may occur because employees themselves choose whether or not to be in the wellness program rather than being randomly assigned. But researchers can only make these adjustments based on known differences, typically demographic and health factors. Motivational differences that may lead employees both to participate in the wellness program and make changes in their health—possibly with or without the program—are not accounted for or even fully understood. Another challenge for researchers is that wellness is morphing into population health management that focuses on mobilizing entire populations, including those dealing with chronic disease, to engage in multiple aspects of the program.