Improve an employee’s health while reducing your healthcare cost - Yes, it's possible!
By Anupal Banerjee on 12/8/2009 7:56:29 AM
While returning from a recent conference on employee compensation, I happened to flip through a Business Week article titled "Tough love, Lower Health costs." The article talks about a new healthcare pilot project at General Electric. Healthcare costs comprise a significant portion of an employee’s benefit package. Today, when HR is expected to deliver higher employee satisfaction with a lower wage bill, GE has taken an innovative approach to balancing these objectives by offering incentives to promote health maintenance. For example, the diabetes health plan offered to GE employees is not your typical “disease management” plan in which employees sign up to receive discounts on medication they take but fill the prescriptions themselves. This new plan puts the onus on the employee. GE offers incentives such as discounts on out-of-pocket expenses for diabetes-specific treatment to employees when they maintain their regimens. Employees must schedule physician check-ups and submit to other preventive measures twice a year. Promotion of health maintenance is a boon for companies. Paying for care for full-blown disease is far more costly than paying for out-of-pocket expenses that reduce the need for expensive procedures. Love the idea. As one senior executive with a workplace health services puts it, "improving the health and wellbeing of our employees makes good business sense. It can make a difference to a company's bottom line and the impact it can have on employee morale and motivation is amazing".
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Re: Improve an employee’s health while reducing your healthcare cost - Yes, it's possible! Its indeed a very good idea. Organisation can immensly gain, marrying the idea with International standards such as OHSAS 18001 & 18002 (Occupational health and safety mangement system)and insentivise schemes. Safety though is to be taken as integral part of health and well being too of employees and employers.       By Anupam Banerjee on 12/9/2009 7:50:23 AM

Re: Improve an employee’s health while reducing your healthcare cost - Yes, it's possible! I could not agree more! The health of an employee will not only increase his productivity, but also improve the quality of his or her work. In addition, it will make the attitudes positive, and that will reduce conflict.       By Maj Gen (Retd)Surjit Singh on 12/16/2009 2:23:38 PM

 

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