Company Wellness : Obesity Management Programs – Key Measures.

Thinking about an obesity-related disease management program for your company? 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 medical costs.

Just how wide-reaching should the program be? After all, it doesn’t make sense to pay for services your workers don’t want or can’t use.

Mary Beth Chalk of Resources for Living suggests that obesity programs can be broken down into four tiers of employee need, from which your organization’s ROI can also be measured.

Tier 1 –  Education

Tier I staff members struggle with weight management problems but don’t need a health Coach.  Instead, they could benefit from a self-directed program that provides weight-management related materials online, targeted mailing, and/or access to nurse call line.

Precisely how to measure Return On Investment –  utilization. Do workforce click on the Web site? Do they return to the site regularly? Do individuals  use the nurse line? Your wellness program vendor ought to provide you detailed use stats.

Tier 2 –  Clinical supervision

When the worker has been diagnosed as obese – a Body Mass Index  score over 30 is obese, over 35 is clinically obese – he or she’d do better working with a wellness coach in a clinically supervised wellness program.

Three keys to getting maximum results –

1. Periodically have participants rate their relationship with their wellness Coaches. Not everyone clicks, so a change could  be in order.

2. Coordinate your disease management care with your employee assistance program (EAP)services. Reason –  Inability to control weight is often closely tied with psychological health issues – and one can negatively 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. Many employees in weight-loss programs get off to a great start 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 challenging to measure with reliable dollar figures. So how can you overcome that problem?

• Start with employees’ salaries. Let’s suppose one participant earns $40,000 each year.

• Ask workers 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.

• Collect scores again six months and one year into the program and then multiply the difference by salary.  The result is your estimated productivity Return On Investment.

In the example above, if the staff member earning $40,000 improves from 50 percent to 75 percent after one year, the productivity related ROI 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 medical conditions related to obesity – like diabetes, high blood pressure, and/or sleep apnea – and needs a doctor case manager.

Specifically, the staff member needs to set up regular visits with the physician and develop a treatment plan.

To measure Return On Investment (ROI), start with the lower-tier criteria, then track quarterly and year differences in FMLA or paid 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 employee has been diagnosed as morbidly obese – Body Mass Index over 40 – and is considered a potential candidate for gastric bypass surgery.

Return On Investment (ROI) is measured through ongoing health claims in addition to the previous criteria.