Corporate Health & Wellness
Understanding the Corporate Health & Wellness industry.
Overview
Companies spend an average of $742 per employee per year on wellness programs with a focus on improving employee satisfaction and increasing employee attraction/retention.
On the healthcare side, in 2017 general U.S. national health expenditures per capita were $10,739 and have continued to rise (include government sponsored programs). Employer sponsored family health coverage in 2020 reached $20,576 and continue to rise. An analysis by Covered California projects a 4% and 40% increase next year, with COVID concerns playing into these statistics.
When considering corporate sponsored programs, it is important to distinguish between wellness, wellbeing and health terminology. The National Institute of Health (NIH) describes the relationship as “health refers to physical, mental, and social well-being; wellness aims to enhance well-being.” The terms are further defined below:
Health is “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” — World Health Organization (WHO)
Wellness is the “active pursuit of activities, choices and lifestyles that lead to a state of holistic health” — The Global Wellness Institute (GWI)
Well-being is one’s perception of their state in the world. This includes “global judgments of life satisfaction and feelings ranging from depression to joy.” — Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Most Corporate Health & Wellness Programs fall into three buckets: workplace strategy, insurance incentives and digital products. A key element to any of these segments is the need to include medical professional review or credentials. Demand for evidence based offerings, or offerings through accredited mental health practitioners is critical to gain trust in this highly specialized field.
Digital Products
Digital health is typically designed with the consumer in mind, when the challenges more often are on the side of the provider and payer. Most enterprise solutions (corporate wellness programs) are general, unpersonalized and lack employee engagement. Opportunities exist to integrate wellness interventions of enterprise software systems with point solutions.
- Gamification: With the upswing of interest in fitness trackers such as Fitbit or the Apple Watch, it’s not surprising that wearables could be considered the biggest current trend in workplace wellness. In a recent survey, 62% of respondents reported that they would be interested in using a wearable fitness tracker as part of their corporate wellness program.
- Biometric screenings and other methods of bio data collection are shifting, with many players looking to blockchain as an alternative. Large tech companies (Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.) increasing focus on health data acquisition, through wearable devices and proprietary algorithms, as well as M&A. Blockchain would facilitate patient control over access points to data, which could include their medical records, wellness data, etc., granting access to their provider, payer, with utility tokens. Blockchain hasn’t been adopted widely within hospital systems because of three key reasons: Hospital systems are slow to adopt new technologies, Hospital practitioners dislike adopting new technologies that require additional steps, or add work to their days and Payers and providers are reluctant to rely on new, unknown technologies without proven security records, that will have access to all patient data and health records.
- Telehealth systems have an opportunity to bridge healthcare providers with wellness providers (wellness coaches, nutritionists, fitness trainers). Issues in past have related to data and policies surrounding these separate systems. Use of chatbots in order to increase availability of practitioners/coaches/programs.
Workplace Strategy
The solutions offer a combination or active and passive approaches to offer corporate health and wellness programs to employees.
- Playbooks such as the Return to Work product offered as a result of the current COVID-19 pandemic are offered at a variety of levels. The product is originating from players ranging from investment firms (Sequoia) to tech leaders (IBM) and health insurance companies (Kaiser).
- Onsite Clinic: Johns Hopkins offers a comprehensive program that includes onsite pharmacy and prescribing, preventive care, occupational medicine, employee engagement and targeted wellness programs and occupational safety.
- Building certifications: the landscape has shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic, with more players and products entering the market.
Insurance Incentives
This is the clear winner for the bottom-line, with measurable OKRs that lead to shifts for insurance premium costs.
- Serving healthy food options opens the door to underwriting cost benefits with healthcare insurance providers.
- Many healthcare insurance companies have built-in financial incentives for employees, such as gym reimbursement costs that are rewarded for participation (number of visits to the gym in a given time period).
- Integrating health and wellness data, preventative programming, and insurance claims, creates incentive claims for end users and employers
- Health Risk Assessments create transparency and an obvious value-add for insurance negotiations.
Challenges
Throughout the corporate health and wellness landscape, integration is missing in an increasingly crowded SaaS space. Once a company has arrived on the tools and platforms to deploy for a given client, they may also face the following obstacles:
- Lack of engagement due to ineffective onboarding and reminders: B2B, B2B2C, B2C wellness interventions are all having issues with securing long-term engagement.
- Lack of customization for individual recommendations which are not holistic, personalized, or of high value to end user. This tend to discourage long-term engagement.
- Behavioral change is a long-term commitment. Many wellness solutions focus on physical health/wellness without mental health/behavioral change component. Opportunities/trends with greater prioritization of mental health and wellbeing, including substance abuse and treatment plans.
