As companies look for more ways to lower medical costs and increase productivity, they are increasingly turning to so-called wellness programs aimed at promoting healthier behavior among workers.
About half of employers with at least 50 workers offer them, as do 90 percent of companies with more than 50,000 employees, according to a study for the Labor Department by the RAND Corp., a nonprofit research group.
But a new study by RAND and PepsiCo Inc., published online in the journal Health Affairs, found programs aimed at helping people with chronic illnesses by educating them and reminding them to take medication resulted in significant cost savings. But so-called lifestyle-management offerings, which aim to reduce health risks through programs focusing on weight loss or stress management, resulted in no net savings at all.
The study examined more than 67,000 people eligible to participate in PepsiCo’s “Healthy Living” wellness program, which includes both disease management and lifestyle components for employees and their families.
The researchers found that seven years of continuous participation in the program – whether in its disease management component, its lifestyle component or both – resulted in an average monthly reduction of $30 in health-care costs per member. But when researchers looked at each component separately, they found the savings was largely attributable to disease management.
Researchers estimate disease management lowered health costs by $136 per member per month, mostly because of a 29 percent reduction in hospital admissions. Lifestyle programs had no significant effect on health-care costs.
The results are not necessarily surprising, Soeren Mattke said, a scientist at RAND and the study’s senior author, because it is easier to save money by addressing the problems of those whose baseline medical costs are already significant.
“Cutting one hospital admission saves a lot of money,” he said.
The RAND findings do not mean lifestyle programs don’t have benefits; participants reported a small drop in absenteeism, for instance. But the lifestyle portion of the program “did not provide more savings than it cost to offer,” Mattke said.
Researchers estimate for each dollar spent, the disease management program saved an average of $3.78, compared with 48 cents for the lifestyle offerings. Together, the programs saved $1.46 for each dollar spent.
