Employers Use of Online Health Tools to Stem Rising Costs Often Fails
Employers are looking for ways to ensure a healthier employee population, to have more satisfied employees, to increase productivity and decrease absenteeism, and to reduce the high costs of health to their companies. Employees want a solution that is easy to use and useful enough to keep them accessing it regularly. CentriHealth's Individual Health Record (IHR) is a unique solution that supports employers in meeting these goals.
Changing Behaviour
As part of their effort to slow down rising healthcare insurance costs, employers are increasingly trying to improve their employees' understanding of the benefits of individual accountability and to have their employees assume increasing responsibility for their health and well-being. The first generation of Personal Health Records has shown that unless employees are provided personalized, useful and usable tools and access to information about them, they will not become better consumers. To help employees and their families manage their health and diseases as effectively as possible, lifestyle programs that encourage health-promoting behaviour and disease management for chronic medical conditions must be useful, usable and used.
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Engaging Employees
Many employers have commenced initiatives using online health support tools targeted at engaging their employees in their health and healthcare. Sadly, most of today's existing online health tools suffer from low user adoption and seldom demonstrably affect employee health behaviour. Such tools typically provide generic health information and are not personalized to the individual or contain error-prone and hard-to-understand information from the claims, medication and laboratory data streams. Trying to influence employee health behaviour and lifestyle choices by using platitudes and general health facts (the “exhortations and lamentations” approach) has not proved effective. The IHR is one of the only tools that demonstrates decreased per member per month costs and improved HEDIS quality across a broad spectrum of employee chronic conditions.
