How to Use Data to Improve Employee Healthcare Benefits

“I had been feeling poorly for a while, making it difficult for me to do my job and spend time with my family. I went to the health center at work and my blood work showed I had diabetes, low iron, and high cholesterol.” – Lillie, Marathon Health patient, Wayne Farms employee, and winner of Healthy Like Me.

Lillie needed information to make an informed decision about her health. Lillie’s worksite health coach used her health data to help her set goals and develop a plan to improve her health. Your business is no different. Before preparing the annual budget, your company likely reviews monthly and annual financial reports to understand trends, risks, and opportunities. When worksite healthcare is paired with advanced reporting, you gain valuable insight to guide your workforce healthcare decisions and improve employee healthcare benefits.

Identify Health Risks Using Data

When you know which health risks are impacting your workforce, you can build plans to reduce them. Our business intelligence and data analysis teams are the number-crunching, data-diving folks working behind the scenes to identify employee health risks. They use data to improve employee healthcare benefits by analyzing:

• Claims data
• Biometric screening data
• Health risk assessment survey results

Combining these three sources of health information helps patients, providers, and clients identify and manage health risks.

Reduce Health Risk

Once you know which health risks and chronic conditions affect your employees, your business can put worksite health and wellness resources in place to address and reduce these risks. Your clinical team can tailor health center services, programming, and outreach to manage specific illness and chronic conditions. For example, a clinician may offer nutrition education classes with automatic alerts to engage individuals with chronic conditions like diabetes or hypertension.

Lastly, reporting is essential to track and understand your worksite health center’s performance and value.

Capture Health Savings

Studies show that poor employee health (especially mental health) costs U.S. employers $153 billion each year in lost productivity, absenteeism, and turnover. To understand your employee health costs, it’s important to analyze claims data, measure health outcomes, and track downstream and redirected care costs.

At Marathon Health, patients utilizing our worksite health centers cost 34 percent less than those who do not use the health center. Multiply those savings across your workforce and you’re looking at significant savings. In fact, our customers average a 3:1 return on investment. Healthcare data and analytics allow worksite health centers to deliver customized, patient-centered care to your employees to improve their health and reduce costs.

So, how did Lillie use data to inform her road to health improvement? After her biometric screening and health risk assessment, Lillie connected with her health coach, changed her diet, began exercising, lost weight, and reduced her blood sugar. Lillie’s story is one of thousands and serves as a reminder of the power of health data. Your worksite healthcare team can help the Lillie’s of your workforce by identifying health risks, mitigating them, improving employee health, and ultimately, capture savings.