Nearly all large firms in the U.S. offer workplace wellness programs, which are widely touted to improve employee health and reduce health care costs. The Affordable Care Act has further expanded the government's support of wellness programs by including multiple provisions encouraging their use. Despite their growing popularity, there is little rigorous evidence available on the causal effects on health or distributional impacts of these programs. In addition, many firms find it challenging to obtain high participation rates among their workforce. This project seeks to improve our understanding of workplace wellness programs. The researchers will analyze data from a randomized study to estimate the effect of financial incentives on program participation; investigate who benefits from these programs; and estimate the effects of these programs on health care costs, utilization, and worker productivity. The results of this research will inform policies aimed at increasing efficiency in the provision of health care in the US, and in so doing, improving the health of Americans and strengthening the U.S. economy.
This research project continues the PIs on-going study on the effectiveness of workplace wellness programs. The research team will design and implement a field experiment at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The researchers will randomly assign some employees to a treatment group who will be given the opportunity to participate in a high-quality workplace wellness program, and the rest to a control group. The project will also randomly offer different monetary incentives to employees in the treatment group. In this extension of the project, the PIs will introduce an additional year of the wellness intervention and track outcomes two years after the initial study. Data on outcomes (health care cost, health care utilization, and labor productivity) will be collected for both treatment and control groups. The researchers will then estimate the distributional effects of the program by comparing employees in the treatment group who choose to enroll into the program to those who choose not to enroll. Finally, the PIs will estimate the two-year causal effect of the program by comparing health care costs, utilization, and productivity among employees of the treatment group to employees in the control group. Differential monetary incentives within the treated group will allow for the estimation of response elasticities at various levels of incentives. The results of this research will contribute to the efficient development of health care policy in the US, thus strengthening the US economy.
