Health Care Survey Of Employees Offers Insight To Participation In Employer Provided Programs

Hewitt and the National Business Group on Health’s survey reveals five crucial insights into how employees and their dependents view health care. In order to prepare their company health care plans, it is critical to be aware of the results of the survey. Help for prescription medication is high on the list. 

Many workers are not doing what they have to do to get healthy even though they know better. Seventy two percent of the workers surveyed believe that receiving regular preventive care will result in good health. An additional 84% think that making sensible decisions in their daily life will lead to overall good health. Only half of the employees think they do a great or good job of eating healthy, while less than half (46%) reported doing a great or good job of working out on a regular basis. To help with the expensive cost of prescription medicine, most employees surveyed ranked prescription program assistance pretty high. 

In spite of high satisfaction in health programs, participation remains low. Employees and dependents say they might know what actions they need to take to get and stay healthy, but involvement in many employer-provided health enhancement programs is not as high as businesses would like. Biometric screenings are the most popular programs with online health information tools and health risk questionnaires following closely. The least popular programs were stress management programs and employee assistance programs. For employees that had dependent coverage, a prescription program was the number one satisfying benefit.

Financial motivation is a strong factor in participation but non monetary, internal motivators can be just as valuable. Frequently, employers assume that providing monetary incentives for participating in programs will increase participation. Citing that it is “the right thing to do”, close to half of all employees surveyed would complete a health risk questionnaire Twenty-nine percent would participate in a HRQ for an incentive and almost the same number would complete it if there was a penalty. In addition, 44% of the employees surveyed said they would be willing to take part in a wellness program provided by their employer because “it is the right thing to do”.

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