Measuring the ROI of a wellness program
How do you know if your wellness program is effective?
After lack of employee participation, wellness program customers cite inadequate reporting as the reason they were dissatisfied with a program. Many purchasers of wellness programs dive in without having fully defined the problems they are trying to solve. As a result, the reporting they receive doesn’t seem to directly measure progress against the change within their workforce that they had hoped to create.
Goals
Before you decide that a wellness program is the right tool to address your challenges — and certainly before you select a specific wellness platform — you must define the specific problems you want to solve. Success is usually viewed as reduction in employee health costs and, more specifically, a reduction in medical claims. However, it is important to recognize that workforce participation in a wellness program could cause costs to increase the first year as more employees will likely be driven to check-ups and wellness visits that are key to preventive care.
This initial increase in cost and utilization is an important step toward preventing more significant longer-term costs. As a result, clients should count on committing to a wellness program for at least two years before judging its effectiveness or concluding that it has not been successful.
Data and Evaluation
To help clients define their goals, WellSpark starts by first asking this key question:
“What situation exists today that you want to tackle, and how will it look one year from now when a wellness program addresses it successfully?”
With that question answered, WellSpark can craft and deliver reporting that is targeted, tailored, and focused on measuring progress against achieving intended change. From the extensive and comprehensive metrics collected for all programs, WellSpark can select and share data that is the most relevant, meaningful, and actionable for clients.
How does WellSpark demonstrate ROI?
Many wellness programs offer participation levels as their performance guarantee, absent any demonstration of how that participation impacted employee health costs, absenteeism, or productivity. Other programs offer reporting that ties more directly to health care cost savings, such as claims data, lowering A1C, weight loss, or even further-downstream impact such as reduced absenteeism. In these cases, the assumed conclusion is lowered cost. However, this cost reduction is viewed in aggregate per month across the entire employee population and does not reveal how participation averted cost
originating with any single employee.
The ROI model, which is return on dollars already spent, is more akin to care management which should be taking place with employees who are already sick, making implementation of a wellness program too late. Instead, WellSpark pursues a Future Cost Avoidance (FCA) approach, which aims to solve for
emerging risk. The goal is not to reduce cost but avoid it altogether by reaching employees who have the potential to cost a company the most versus those who already are. When applied to WellSpark, the “I” in ROI is an investment in avoiding spend versus trying to manage them later.
Ultimately, you are highly likely to see outcomes that lead to meaningful engagement and real future cost avoidance if you: clearly define the problem(s) you are trying to solve, deploy recommended engagement tactics and strategies, and give a program enough time to mature.
Learn more about how to select the right wellness program for your organization.