GiftCard Partners Blog

Did you know that March is National Nutrition Month®? The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics created the annual campaign to focus on the importance of making informed food choices, developing sound eating habits, and encouraging healthy physical activity. The 2016 National Nutrition Month theme is "Savor the Flavor of Eating Right," which encourages everyone to take the time to enjoy food traditions, appreciate the pleasures of food, flavors, and the social aspect that food adds to our lives.

Insurance broker involvement in wellness programs is on the rise. In the past insurance brokers may have helped human resources departments select and negotiate the best insurance plans for their workforce. But with the introduction of the Affordable Care Act and the incentives that are geared toward employee wellness, a broker’s job role is expanding. Now just how far that expansion reaches is still dependent on the broker. The graph below is taken from
RAND’s latest employer survey and breaks down the involvement levels that different insurance brokers have in their clients’ wellness programs.

Employers, together with health insurance plans, continue to look for creative ways to incentivize and reward healthy behaviors. The ultimate goal is to get people on the path to better health or keep them there. Around $25 billion is being spent on incentives, which includes apps, devices, games and more, all devoted to helping people change their longstanding, ingrained bad habits.
Harvard Pilgrim Health Care is utilizing an app called
Nurtisavings to reward members for making healthy supermarket purchases. “What we consume has got so much impact on health and well-being, the supermarket should be part of the overall health care delivery system”, stats Niraj Jetly, COO of Nutrisavings. Nutrisavings scores more than 200,000 foods on a scale of 0 to 100, 0 being the least healthy option (i.e. Soda). The score is totaled upon check out and if your average monthly score is 60 or higher, you earn $10. That's free money just by making modestly healthy decisions when going to the store, some of which you may already be doing anyway. Another health insurance company will take $5 off of health insurance deductibles for every 30-minute workout. These workouts are at GPS confirmed gyms or connected through wearable technology such as a
Fitbit device. A minimum of 3 workouts per week must be logged.  “By smartly adjusting the deductible based on exercise, we can save a small business tens of thousands of dollars a year in terms of their health costs,” says Pact Health co-founder and CEO Yifan Zhang. 
Pact Health is the company behind this option. While the possibility of cheating does exist, setting clear rules and expectations beforehand can help to curb that.  You need to show your employees that you trust them, because the overall outcome is a healthier workforce, more productive employees, reduced absenteeism, and most importantly you are letting your employees know that above all else, you value their health. Read the full article, along with more details on what incentives may work for your company,
here!

As certain benefit costs shift from employer to employee, there are key benefits that will have a high impact on satisfaction improvements. Health and wellness benefits are expected from employees and they assume that employers are going to cover a significant portion of the costs, regardless of the rising cost of healthcare. Well employers are taking note, 45% are offering HSA's in 2014, compared to 33% in 2010. Other benefits like tuition support or a personal car subsidy benefit have been on the decline since 2010, down 13% and 17% respectively. These are benefits less expected by employees and therefore have a lower impact on employee benefit satisfaction. Health and wellness benefits have endured for employees as an expected benefit. Investing in preventative healthcare checks like blood pressure, cholesterol and BMI measurements for employees can allow employers to maintain health and wellness benefits without exceeding budgets. Implementing employee health and wellness benefit reward programs can also motivate employees towards health and wellness goals by using small spot rewards to encourage employees who have reached health and wellness milestones.
For more information on how to maintain the level of health and wellness benefits your employees expect, check out the latest SHRM Employee benefits report, and this article from Associations Now.