Gaps in Care

It’s the beginning of a new year and you and your Wellness Committee have strategized your company’s health improvement plan. You are feeling confident that you will address the main health risks in your employee demographics. Of course, we know it is impossible to hit all the topics needed within a wellness program, but are you covering some topics that could be very detrimental to their health and your claims? I am referring to gaps in care for preventative, age appropriate, screenings such as mammograms, colonoscopies, PSA screenings, skin cancer screenings, dental and vision exams.

Some employers have gone above and beyond to address this situation, such as giving employees a chance to “call in well”.  This program gave the employee 4 hours PTO to use for a preventative visit (with verification required).  Another program would incentivize the employee with points or gift cards when they show proof of screenings and immunizations completed.

As the workforce is showing a significant number of older workers, are they being proactive about their health? One of the best programs that I ran across in my years in workplace wellness was at a local school system. They started a “Mention Prevention” Campaign and reminded the employees about the services available to them for free and celebrated success stories. Not only did they post the educational materials on their intranet, they send out postcards with the information. They had pictures of breast cancer survivors holding a very large number, that number represented the number of years they have been a survivor and told their story of early detection and the importance of screenings. They invested in posters and worked with their carrier to make it easy for the employees to find what screenings they should be doing and what was covered and the in-network providers.

To give another example of closing the gap on prevention, I was at a client’s biometric event. After a few years of the biometric screenings they decided, because they had an older workforce population, to offer PSA screenings and thyroid screenings to employees over 50. (This is an option with most on-site biometrics vendors.) The next year a gentleman came up to us and thanked us. He said he was 57 and never went to the doctor because he thought he was healthy. Last year at the biometrics event he took advantage of the free PSA screenings and the results showed an elevated PSA. He followed up with a doctor and was told he had early stage prostate cancer. It was caught it in time to be treatable and he was grateful to his employer for offering this service.

It is stories like these that make employee wellness such an important part of today’s workplace culture.