Healthcare Costs – What are we doing?

Just because we are an Insurance and Risk Management Professional Services firm, does not mean we are immune to the increasing costs of Healthcare. We advise our clients to seek out solutions to help manage their healthcare costs – however it has been increasingly difficult to just look at employee participant cost percentages and increased deductibles as a long term solution.

We have extended our service offerings to include a Wellness Executive. However, we can only consult on what we know ourselves. Our Wellness Executive started with us first. Our focus the past two year s has been on incorporating Wellness into our culture and how to affect behaviors that will make our employees healthier and happier, but also slow down our increasing healthcare costs in the long-term.

So how are we doing? Well it is hard to change behavior as we knew it would be. Our employees certainly all want to live healthier lives, but in the hustle and bustle of a work day, old habits are hard to break and new habits difficult to introduce. We also underestimated the impact our vendors have on food that filters into the office. Donuts, cookies and other fast food s continue to make its way into meetings.

But we are making progress. I see more of our employees walking during their lunch hour. We have two “on site” exercise programs that are popular with employees and are well attended. Our Wellness team is implementing a communications piece to our Vendors to ask for their participation in our wellness initiative.

As the U.S. enters a reform era for Healthcare, we are doing our small part to help our clients and our employees try new pro-active approaches to cost containment and hopefully cost reduction.

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