Suchergebnisse

Purpose. To examine health insurance companies' role in employee wellness. Approach. Case studies of eight insurers. Setting. Wellness activities in work, clinical, online, and telephonic settings. Participants. Senior executives and wellness program leaders from Blue Cross Blue Shield health insurers and from one wellness organization. Methods. Telephone interviews with 20 informants. Results. Health insurers were engaged in wellness as part of their mission to promote health and reduce health care costs. Program components included the following: education, health risk assessments, incentives, coaching, environmental consultation, targeted programming, onsite biometric screening, professional support, and full-time wellness staff. Programs relied almost exclusively on positive incentives to encourage participation. Results included participation rates as high as 90%, return on investment ranging from $1.09 to $1.65, and improved health outcomes. Conclusion. Health insurers have expertise in developing, implementing, and marketing health programs and have wide access to employers and their employees' health data. These capabilities make health insurers particularly well equipped to expand the reach of wellness programming to improve the health of many Americans. By coupling members' medical data with wellness-program data, health insurers can better understand an individual's health status to develop and deliver targeted interventions. Through program evaluation, health insurers can also contribute to the limited but growing evidence base on employee wellness programs.

This work summarizes how hospital discharge data are used, identifies strengths and shortcomings, and presents suggestions for enhancing usefulness of the data. Results demonstrate that discharge data are used in a wide range of applications by diverse users. Uses include public health and population-based applications, as well as quality assessment, informed purchasing, strategic planning, and policymaking. Strategies to enhance the utility of discharge data include: improving the quality of existing data elements and adding new data elements that will support more advanced analyses, improving linkages with data from nonhospital settings and databases outside health care, and developing a technical assistance network to support statewide data organizations in their efforts to collect and analyze discharge data. As our nation moves toward universal electronic medical records, it will be important to keep in mind the many uses of discharge data in order to maintain the data capacity to fill these needs.