How can employers engage their employees to become accountable for improving and managing their health?
Most organizations believe they have the power to improve overall employee health and productivity and have, in recent years, provided employees with tools for making health care choices. Although employees seem to appreciate these services and tools, it does not always result in their improved health and work productivity. What is required is an integrated strategy that raises accountability and effectiveness of all stakeholders. Incentive plans that simply reward people for improving their health often do not result in long-lasting behavior changes or lower health costs. Alternatively, employees are more likely to adopt long-term behavior change if they have a personal relationship with, and are accountable to, someone who can reinforce their self-determined plan for behavior change. Integrated strategy starts by identifying individual employees with health risks through Health Risk Assessments (HRA) and reviewing medical and pharmacy claims data. Those employees can then be offered
