Obesity Management Programs – Key Measures.
Thinking about an obesity-related disease management program for your business? Here is what you need to know.
In order to be effective, the health promotion program must meet participants’ individual medical and psychological needs, not to mention your own organization’s need to control long-term healthcare costs.
Exactly how wide-reaching should the program be? After all, it doesn’t make sense to pay for services your personnel don’t want or can’t use.
Mary Beth Chalk of Resources for Living suggests that obesity programs may be broken down into four tiers of staff member need, from which your organization’s ROI can also be measured.
Tier 1 – Education
Tier I workforce struggle with weight control problems but don’t need a wellness Coach. Instead, they might benefit from a self-directed program that provides weight-management related materials online, targeted mailing, and/or access to nurse call line.
How to measure Return On Investment (ROI) – utilization. Do workers click on the Web site? Do they return to the site regularly? Do people use the nurse line? Your wellness program provider should provide you detailed use stats.
Tier 2 – Clinical supervision
When the staff member has been diagnosed as obese â.” a BMI score over 30 is obese, over 35 is clinically obese â.” he or she would do better working with a wellness coach in a clinically supervised health promotion program.
Three keys to getting maximum results -
1. Periodically have participants rate their relationship with their health Coaches. Not everybody clicks, so a change may be in order.
2. Coordinate your disease management care with your staff member assistance program (EAP)services. Reason – Inability to control weight is usually closely tied with mental health issues â.” and one can adversely affect the other.
The more closely your employee assistance program and obesity program managers work together, the higher the chance for success.
3. Beware of the fade-out effect. A lot of staff in weight-loss programs get off to a great begin and then fall back into old habits. People should re-commit to the program after three sessions, four months and nine months.
To measure ROI, look at utlization, goal achievement and reduced presenteeism. of course, presenteeism is notoriously difficult to measure with reliable dollar figures. So how can you overcome that problem?
o Begin with employees’ salaries. Let’s suppose one participant earns $40,000 annually.
o Ask staff members to self-report how energetic and productive they feel on the job, on a percentage scale. Then have supervisors estimate the employee’s productivity and split the difference. for this example, let’s assume it averaged to 50 percent.
o Collect scores again six months and one year into the program and then multiply the difference by salary. The result is your estimated productivity ROI.
In the example above, when the worker earning $40,000 improves from 50 percent to 75 percent after one year, the productivity related Return On Investment is $10,000.
Tier 3 – Medical management
At this level, the obese employee needs a higher level of care than a health coach can offer. The employee has chronic health conditions related to obesity â.” like diabetes, high blood pressure, and/or sleep apnea â.” and needs a doctor case manager.
Especially, the worker needs to set up regular visits with the physician and develop a treatment plan.
To measure Return On Investment, begin with the lower-tier criteria, then track quarterly and year differences in FMLA or compensated absences, and prescription drug costs. Then compare it to the per-participant cost of the obesity program.
Tier 4 – Morbid obesity
At this level, the staff member has been diagnosed as morbidly obese â.” Body Mass Index over 40 â.” and is considered a potential candidate for gastric bypass surgery.
Return On Investment is measured through ongoing health claims in addition to the previous criteria.
