Thinking about an obesity-related disease management program for your corporation? Here’s what you need to know.

In order to be effective, the wellness program must meet participants’ individual medical and psychological needs, not to mention your own organization’s need to control long-term medical costs.

How wide-reaching should the program be? After all, it doesn’t make sense to pay for services your employees don’t want or can’t use.

Mary Beth Chalk of Resources for Living suggests that obesity programs may be broken down into four tiers of staff member need, from which your organization’s Return On Investment (ROI) can also be measured.

Tier 1 –  Education

Tier I workers struggle with weight management problems but don’t need a wellness Coach.  Instead, they might benefit from a self-directed program that provides weight-management related materials online, targeted mailing, and/or access to nurse call line.

How to measure ROI –  utilization. Do workforce click on the Web site? Do they return to the site regularly? Do people  use the nurse line? Your health promotion program provider ought to provide you detailed use stats.

Tier 2 –  Clinical supervision

When the employee has been diagnosed as obese – a Body Mass Index (BMI)  score over 30 is obese, over 35 is clinically obese – he or she would do better working with a health coach in a clinically supervised wellness program.

Three keys to getting maximum results –

1. Periodically have participants rate their relationship with their wellness Coaches. Not everybody clicks, so a change may  be in order.

2. Coordinate your disease management care with your worker assistance program (EAP)services. Reason –  Inability to control weight is often closely tied with mental health issues – and one can negatively affect the other.

The more closely your EAP and obesity program managers work together, the higher the chance for success.

3. Beware of the fade-out effect. A lot of personnel in weight-loss programs get off to a excellent start and then fall back into old habits. People  should re-commit to the program after three sessions, four months and nine months.

To measure ROI, look at utlization, goal achievement and reduced presenteeism. of course, presenteeism is notoriously difficult to measure with reliable dollar figures. So how can you overcome that problem?

• Start with employees’ salaries. Let’s suppose one participant earns $40,000 each year.

• Ask personnel to self-report how energetic and productive they feel on the job, on a percentage scale. Then have supervisors estimate the employee’s productivity and split the difference. for this example, let’s assume it averaged to 50%.

• Collect scores again six months and one year into the program and then multiply the difference by salary.  The result is your estimated productivity Return On Investment.

In the example above, if the worker earning $40,000 improves from 50 percent to 75 percent after one year, the productivity related ROI is $10,000.  

Tier 3 –  Medical management

At this level, the obese worker needs a higher level of care than a wellness coach can offer.  The worker has chronic medical conditions related to obesity – like diabetes, high blood pressure, and/or sleep apnea – and needs a physician case manager.

Namely, the worker needs to set up regular visits with the physician and create a treatment plan.

To measure Return On Investment (ROI), begin with the lower-tier criteria, then track quarterly and year differences in FMLA or compensated absences, and prescription drug costs. Then compare it to the per-participant cost of the obesity program.

Tier 4 –  Morbid obesity

At this level, the employee has been diagnosed as morbidly obese – Body Mass Index over 40 – and is considered a potential candidate for gastric bypass surgery.

Return On Investment (ROI) is measured through ongoing health claims in addition to the previous criteria.