Why an Increasing Focus towards Population Wellness?

Organizations are transitioning from volume-based delivery model to a value-based care delivery model with population wellness programs.

Population wellness programs are becoming the order of the day. What is the reason behind the increasing prevalence of population wellness programs? Healthy staff is productive staff. This makes businesses to be concerned about the wellness of their workforce. More and more organizations are realizing the importance of wellness programs to improve productivity with smooth workflow which is indeed possible with population wellness.

Why Wellness?

Employers try to improve workforce health behavior primarily to reduce health care costs and increase productivity. This is the reason behind conducting wellness programs for employees. Most visible problems identified in corporate sector include anemia, migraines, diabetes, neck pains, back pains, hearing loss, musculoskeletal disorders, etc. People who work in IT industries, call centers, or any other sector that involves sitting and working in cubicles for a long time are the most affected ones. Long absence from work due to health disorders affects organizations from meeting deadlines. Hence, care for them with concerted wellness programs to improve health behaviors. This may include:

• Promoting health system reform.
• Promoting healthy lifestyles among employees.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that as much as 75 percent of all U.S. health care spending is for people with chronic conditions. Health risks like tobacco use, sedentary life, malnutrition, alcoholism take its toll on population wellness and require concerted action to improve wellness.

Wellness Engagement

Individuals form population in population wellness. Many individuals have the common chronic illness. Others will be at high risk of developing these chronic diseases. People will be benefited with changes in lifestyle and they need to be engaged in wellness programs. For this motivational messages can play its part. Besides, financial incentives for lifestyle changes like quitting smoking, alcohol, weight loss can attract people to follow a medical regimen leading to employee well-being.

Role of Technology in Wellness

Technology can provide centralized data on people with disabilities. Both businesses and the employee community are integrated with technology and data on the net. Surveys state the interest of patients to go online to check their medical records. They have a penchant to use smart phones to monitor the health online as they know self-tracking can produce better results.

EHRs can decrease the divides among the population with data by integrating and organizing patient health information and helps in distributing it among all authorized patient care providers. EHR alerts are used to inform providers on patient’s stay for the hospitals to follow up. With EHRs, every provider can have the same accurate and up-to-date information about a patient. Up to date information reduces medical errors; for example the possibility of one specialist knowing an unrelated condition being managed by another specialist does not arise at all.

Organizations can consider enabling an IWPHM (Integrated Wellness and Population Health Management) framework to create a wellness and disease management platform. This will help in building relationships with patient and provider network groups with:

• Access to information.
• Sharing best practices for specialized care with telemedicine.
• Implementing common treatment of patients using evidence based medicine.

What Makes Analytics Key Part of Wellness Program?

Organizations can design wellness programs at the same time track its success. Analytics in wellness programs help organizations to know the member’s needs. Moreover, it allows program manager to approximate the cost of key risk factors and devise a portfolio of interventions. Analytics also allows wellness programs managers to differentiate the program, look at the future and make informed decisions based on key data. Gauging the effectiveness of the wellness program is possible with analytics.

With analytics, program managers can use predictive tools to predict future outcomes based on current data with the combination of statistical data. Data driven from analytics allows the wellness program manager to align performance with budget and hold down rising costs. Of course, the advantages are many. Therefore it is upon the organizations to conduct wellness programs with robust IT tools.

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