Healthcare Organization Creates a 'Culture of Wellness' with their Employees

Situation

The executive leadership team of a large healthcare organization felt there was a significant opportunity for their company and employees to better align and practice their brand values of promoting healthy lifestyles, preventive care and broader healthcare consumerism.  In addition, this self-insured organization was seeing significant upward trends in their employee healthcare spending and were looking to reduce or flatline those costs.

Although they had a number of health management programs in place already offered to employees, the approach was fragmented, lacked strategic focus and hadn't garnered broad adoption and organizational support.  Roberts Golden was engaged to build a comprehensive plan and set out a pragmatic roadmap for creating a "culture of health" across their employees which would have a positive impact on employee health and productivity, reduce the healthcare cost trend for the organization and validate new wellness offerings prior to marketing them to their external customers.

Action

Some of the activities we completed included:

• Gaining leadership alignment on the key objectives and wellness culture they wanted to create
• Developing an integrated change roadmap and positioning internal project leads to run the seven workstreams that were identified as key priorities (such as: smoking cessation, emotional well being, eating healthy...)
• Developing the detailed plan and process for creating their first employee health fair (that could be honed and replicated with employees and customers alike going forward)
• Developing new processes and aligning HR policies and procedures
• Developing a deployment and adoption plan including comprehensive training and communications about what it means to live a healthy lifestyle and how the company would support them in that journey
• Developing a comprehensive measurement strategy for assessing results

Results

Our effort was lauded by leadership as one of the most successful initiatives they'd undertaken to build a sustainable foundation for transforming their culture and maintaining the changes over time.  Further this effort helped them to create significant cost justification to support new product offerings based on these programs.