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America has a
serious weight problem. Public Service Announcements to eat better
and get active can be seen and heard on television and radio. The
concern about the nation's health has even reached the White House,
with First Lady Michelle Obama launching the Let's Move
campaign to fight childhood obesity.
The Thomson
Reuters Workforce Wellness Index (WWI) recently
published research indicating 6 behavioral risk factors could be
linked to 14% of direct healthcare costs in the employed, privately
insured workforce. The risk factor with the most impact on healthcare
cost is Body Mass Index (BMI). While this study and others have
demonstrated BMI's link to an increase in health risks and costs,
many have begun to question the usefulness and accuracy BMI.
BMI is a
formula based on height and weight and is used widely by
physicians, employee wellness programs, and other health
professionals to estimate body fatness and screen for weight
categories that may increase risk for other health problems. According
to the Centers for Disease Control, BMI provides a reliable indicator
of body fatness for most people.
As with other
screening tools, BMI is not perfect. The calculation often
overestimates body fatness for athletes and underestimates for the severely
overweight. Conventional wisdom is changing as more methods for
determining health risks associated with obesity become more widely
available as part of an employer health screening. Measures such as
body fat, waist circumference, and waist to hip ratio used in
conjunction with BMI, are more reliable in predicting risk.
In an effort to
control health care costs, improve productivity, and increase the
overall health of your workforce, many employers have implemented
incentives for improving biometric measures. Most call this a
wellness program.
While wellness
initiatives can provide some motivation for employees to maintain or
improve health, to truly drive outcomes employers need to take a
broader approach to health and productivity by going beyond a
wellness program to adopting a Health Risk Management (HRM) strategy.
HRM requires a cultural shift in the workplace, where policies,
procedures, and practices support health improvement and credible
data is utilized to measure outcomes and efficacy. The simplest way
to state this is: wellness is an outcome, not a strategy.
More
information on the Workforce Wellness Index and BMI can be found by
accessing the following links:
http://healthcare.thomsonreuters.com/Indexes/assets/WorkforceWellnessIndex-FINAL.pdf
http://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/assessing/bmi/
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