How can employers control presenteeism?
Measuring your indirect health care costs is a good start. There are tools out there that can measure how indirect health care costs are affecting your bottom line. A good starting point is the National Committee for Quality Assurance. NCQA developed an interactive tool that takes specific demographics from an employer and measures how indirect and direct health care costs affect the bottom line.
The calculator (ncqacalculator.com) takes the specific demographics of the employer, applies what it will cost the employer to replace lost productivity, lost labor and the cost of temporary employees, and then looks at sick day wages, chronic diseases, lifestyle choices, immunizations, etc. You plug all that data into the calculator and it spits out the effect of these indirect costs on the bottom line.
Just understanding presenteeism and these indirect health care costs isn’t enough. You need to find the tools to measure them. You need to find a health plan that will not only help you understand and grapple with these indirect cost drivers but will give you direction and tools to address them.
What should employers look for in a health plan to help them (and their employees) avoid the pitfalls of presenteeism?
Health plans that have made the investment in information technology and infrastructure can provide you with tools to address lost productivity so that you can see a direct and positive impact on future health care costs.
The U.S. government has mandated that most Americans have electronic medical records — available to both health care providers and patients themselves — by 2014. You need a plan that offers these tools now. Some plans offer a personal health record that gives employees secure, online access to their electronic medical records. Plan members can go online to e-mail their physicians, refill prescriptions, schedule or cancel appointments and check lab test results. So instead of leaving work to take care of these tasks, employees can do them online through their personal health records.
A study by the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University found that patients who communicated with their doctors online were 50 percent less likely to miss work because of illness. When considering a plan, an employer should put online tools up there with price, quality and the extent of network accessibility as major factors in the decision. Having access to these tools enables your employees to address their health care needs while helping them stay at work and productive.
And finally, you need a health plan that can not only give employees the tools and resources to be advocates for their own health care, but also that allows them to bypass unnecessary medical visits and duplicative tests. These factors are important because they can save both you and your employees time and money.
T.C. Williams is the manager of channel strategy for Kaiser Permanente. Reach him at (216) 479-5230 or [email protected].