Businesses urged to track workforce health

Out of frustration with decades of failed efforts to improve America's health and cut its health care spending, a new institute launched an effort Wednesday to attack the problem at work.

The habits of working adults – smoking, lack of exercise, unhealthy eating and high stress – lay the groundwork for health problems years and decades later. Improving those health habits could dramatically reduce health care spending over the long term and make American workers more productive and competitive, said Derek Yach, executive director of the Vitality Institute for Health Promotion, a think-tank that aims to reduce non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, mental illness and cancer.

The Vitality Institute, founded by the South African financial services and insurance provider Discovery Ltd, released a report Wednesday calling for a greater focus on workplace-based prevention activities. A commission, set up by the institute, estimates that the U.S. could save $217–303 billion per year – roughly 5%-7% of total health care spending – by 2023 by putting more emphasis on prevention.

The commission, a panel of experts representing business, non-profits, researchers and government, issued five recommendations, including:

• Companies should start tracking and reporting employee health the way they track and report financial indicators to understand the firm's long-term prospects.

• Researchers should focus more on prevention strategies that work in the real world.

• Investors should favor companies that invest in health.

"If you don't invest in improving the health of your workforce, your workforce is going to lower your own profits, and when they leave, they will go into the Medicare pool and drive up your taxes," Yach said.

The United States has historically underinvested in prevention research and training of health care professionals to promote healthy behaviors in midlife, he said. "The consequence has been that the U.S. health care investments have underperformed relative to (other) developed countries in terms of health gains, health improvements, as well as serious consequences for the impact on the economy." The U.S. spends $3,000 more per person on health care than any other developed country, he said, but we rank near the bottom in terms of health outcomes.

A Microsoft executive put it even more bluntly: "I think there's a broad-based consensus that we really are losing the war on health," said Dennis Schmuland, Microsoft's chief health strategy officer of its U.S. Health and Life Sciences division. "We have to break a three-decade losing streak, where we've been the front-runner in terms of cost of health care and obesity."

There's no one answer to a problem as complex as healthcare, but businesses have to help "pull the levers" of health, Schmuland said. Microsoft, for instance, is about to launch a program to help employees and their families eat better, both in the cafeteria and in their home kitchens.

Working age adults spend so much of their time on the job that it only makes sense to address health at work, said Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, the president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which helped fund some of the Vitality Institute's research.

"We're supporting them because we believe in order for us to have a healthier population, we have to go to where people live, learn, work and play and try to make those places healthy by default," Lavizzo-Mourey said. "With most people spending more and more hours in the workday, it is clear that having an investment by business is key."