DirecTV, a large employer headquartered in Los Angeles, is implementing Work Well Plus, an innovative health and productivity program in a 1,300-employee call center in Boise, Idaho. The Work Well Plus program distinguishes itself from other health promotion programs by offering employees and their physicians a substantial financial incentive to participate, thereby involving all parties who affect an employee's health. To help achieve these goals, high-risk employees are offered personal coaching regarding how to reduce their health risks and adhere to clinical guidelines in the treatment of their chronic disease, physicians are offered patient-specific data and educational resources regarding optimal treatment methods, and physicians and employees share in the savings resulting from reduced medical expenditures and improved productivity. The three specific aims of this proposal are to: (1) Derive job-specific """"""""multipliers"""""""" for every employee at DirecTV. A multiplier is the estimated cost to an employer of an employee's absence or diminished on-the-job productivity, measured as a proportion (often greater than one) of the worker's daily wage. (2) Perform a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of Work Well Plus from the perspective of a profit maximizing employer by analyzing the impact of the program on the medical expenditures, absences, on-the-job productivity, and health of the participating employees. (3) Demonstrate the effectiveness of a new method for measuring the financial benefit to an employer of investing in the health and productivity of its workforce. The long-term objectives of this study are to 1) identify health promotion programs that have sufficiently large net benefits for businesses to implement; and 2) develop a better method for persuasively articulating why employers should invest in the health and productivity of their workforce. DirecTV's Work Well Plus program is an ideal program to evaluate to meet these objectives because of its innovative design, integrated data, and diversity of job types.
| Loeppke, Ron; Nicholson, Sean; Taitel, Michael et al. (2008) The impact of an integrated population health enhancement and disease management program on employee health risk, health conditions, and productivity. Popul Health Manag 11:287-96 |
