BELLEVUE, WA – With the corporate wellness industry expected to reach $1.6 billion by 2010 and $5.8 billion by 2015, a number of healthcare companies are offering programs designed to help the nation’s employees stay healthy.
Officials at Limeade, Inc., a Bellevue, Wash-based online software-as-a-service startup, believe they’re offering a slightly different product – a wellness program that improves not only the physical health of the workforce, but its emotional well-being as well.
“It takes a more engaging, whole-person, whole-population approach,” says Henry Albrecht, the CEO and founder of the roughly three-year-old company. “It’s a fundamentally different approach … that looks at creating a whole-health environment.”
Limeade, which formally launched its Employee Vitality online wellness platform in April, makes use of clinical health, well-being and productivity assessments, goal-tracking (via phone, e-mail and other means), incentive management, journaling/blogging, community forums and connections to other online wellness resources. All assessments are tied to evidence-based guidelines, and dashboards allow company officials to track the overall health of an employee.
“Employees are treated as people rather than sources of information for health costs,” says Albrecht, a former executive with Intuit who sees Limeade’s approach doing the same for workplace wellness as Quicken does for personal finances.
With healthcare costs skyrocketing, wellness programs are enjoying the spotlight – as are the companies who provide them. Aside from the aforementioned estimate from the American Journal of Health Promotion, the Association for Worksite Health Promotion estimates that every dollar invested in worksite wellness will generate $5 in savings to the company.
“Employers are looking for approaches that their employees can embrace,” says Albrecht. “This is actually about things (employees) care about – they don’t think of themselves as health risks.”
Albrecht says employees don’t spend much time on benefits portals set up by their employers because those resources tend to be static. By reaching out to them with an interactive, holistic platform, he says, employees are compelled to feel good about their personal health and to make their workplace more productive.
Employee Vitality, for which employers are billed on a per-employee, per-month basis, is open-ended, allowing it to be integrated with an employer’s existing health plan.
And the name of the company?
“We wanted to pick something that meant ‘real’ and ‘refreshing’ and ‘positive’ and ‘different.’” Albrecht says.
As corporate wellness programs become big business, do you think they have a real impact on healthcare costs? Let us know – email your thoughts to editor@healthcarefinancenews.com.