How a Health Consultant Can Improve Wellness Programs

For employers, it’s a difficult balance: improve productivity through improved employee health, all while containing costs. That’s where an effective health consultant can step in. After all, you do have a business to run, and that requires focus. But you do need hale employees as well as a program that, in this new and evolving business environment, can help you attract and retain talent. Here’s how a health consultant can improve your organization’s wellness program.

The Issue

Improved health and changed behavior go hand in hand. But because behavior modification is often difficult for humans to achieve, you need a health consultant to help your people along. Gaining one can also help you, in terms of increased productivity, for example, as well as your ability to lure and keep employees.

What is Behavioral Health?

Behavioral health can be viewed as the link between a person’s behavior and their physical, mental, and spiritual health. Such behavior can refer to eating and drinking habits, addictive behavior patterns, and exercise, for instance. Examples can include eating disorders, substance abuse, and gambling addiction.

How a Health Consultant Can Benefit from a Wellness Programs

A health consultant is beneficial here because you need to be able to pinpoint and solve issues. But that’s challenging, to say the least if you lack the skills and experience needed to assess your program. The following are ways consultants can help you shore up your program, particularly during these historic times.

• Address wellness program problems. In too many cases, wellness programs fail because employees either don’t participate or scarcely engage. A consultant can help you determine whether that’s due to poor communication, lackluster offerings, or leadership issues.
• Analyze data. You need accurate data if you’re going to alter your healthcare plan. This means data on all program aspects, including risk reduction, behavior change, and productivity measures. A consultant can offer advice and guidance on what data to collect and how to collect it. Then it can be determined whether there’s a marked cost difference between employees who participate in wellness programs and those who don’t.
• Design guidance. The overarching aim is to utilize incentives that offer the most for the lowest possible cost. That’s why the best programs use benefits-based incentives. A quality consultant can show you how to produce incentives that include paid time off, insurance premium discounts, and modifications to insurance benefit plan designs. Such incentives can motivate employees to engage in wellness.
• Craft ways to contain costs. You need a consultant to show you how and where to spend to optimize the program’s effect on employee medical expenses. This means incorporating the wellness program into the benefits plan design and marrying wellness programming with disease and case management. A consultant can help you bring all this together.
• Help with specialized projects. When you get into the nuts and bolts of wellness program design and creation, you may need consultant help with software design, ideas for data collection and design, data platform development, data systems integration, writing white papers, and even conducting specialized training. After all, an effective consultant will have expertise across a broad range of skillsets.

During these unprecedented times, when employers have so much to deal with, you’ll do yourself and your employees a favor by enlisting the help of a health consultant to improve your wellness program, which can ultimately help with recruitment and retention, not to mention productivity. We suggest that you go with the firm Mercer, which can help you reimagine your benefits strategy for a healthier workforce – and bottom line.

Alban Parsons

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