Burn the Box - The Future of Employee Wellness:

You've probably been involved or put together an employee wellness program at your company. But there's something else you're not thinking about when it comes to the long game of your employee health. Everyone, this is Anthony Honesto and this is my burn the box drop for this week. I am talking about employee wellness, but I'm talking about it in a way. So we've been part of these weight loss programs in the past. In fact, I've put together a bunch of these weight loss programs where you team folks up collective percentages of weight loss and they get rewarded. Either they get an award or maybe a discount on their contributions for healthcare. Because the idea is if we can create a healthy employee, it reduces the burden on our employee benefit cost. It's just very simple equation. But frankly, have these programs really worked? I will argue that they haven't. Let's start looking at the data and I think there's a solution that we can think about here that could be potentially something that has a direct impact both in the short and long term. Well, first of all, let's look at the numbers, especially around obesity. So it says that there's a report in the United states that says 1 in 5 adults are considered obese. And between the numbers of the dates of 1999 to 2000, then again 2000 to 2017, obesity rates escalated from 30% to 41.9%. It is a an issue within the United States you've seen recently is the sale of Ozempic and Wegovy. You're probably familiar with these drugs are expected to hit 53 billion in sales over the next two years. So you've probably seen the commercial o o Ozempic. It's actually a jingle that was Adapted by Pilot's 1975 hit called Magic which was o o o it's magic. And frankly what we've seen from this particular drug, it seems to be magical. It is originally prescribed for folks with diabetes and now a lot of folks are taking it for weight loss and considering the opportunity. So there is an opportunity within your health plan to have these drugs available to your employees. And the drugs like Wegovy, Zempic, now they're zepbound. Could these drugs, drugs have a more short term and long term effect on your employee health? Well, if you look at the potential opportunities and this is without all the side effects and other things in terms of consideration, but looking at looking at your employee health benefits instead of looking at these contests which don't have a direct long term or short term impact, on your benefit costs and looking more towards solutions like an Ozempic or a Wegovy and allowing your employees to have those costs, those drugs available to them in your benefit programs could have a both short term and long term effect. It makes sense, right? If you can reduce the obesity rates, if you can reduce the weight loss or accelerate the weight loss in your organization, think about how many long term and short term effects there could be. Definitely in the short term. And we're seeing this impact a lot of different folks now. People take it for cosmetic reasons, but really when you think about it, there's health, there's correlation of obesity to major health issues that could potentially be stalled or paused or even avoided by having these drugs available to your employees. So when you think about your employee benefits, think of things like this. This is what I think about the blog posts and the newsletter topic of Burning the Box as it's like, let's do healthcare programs and give awards. It's not working. Let's include these drugs. Maybe you're, you're not including them, maybe some of you are including them. But this is a. To burn the box or don't think inside or outside the box, completely burn it. Maybe we need to be thinking differently on offering drugs or strategically thinking about the benefits we provide our employees that absolutely have direct short and long term impact on their health. It's an interesting idea. I think it's something that a lot of benefit providers would look at. The short term costs of these drugs, which are fairly high, although they are getting cheaper because the competition is starting to get into, into this space. But if you look at the short term cost versus the term benefit, this could be something that really is a game changer for your organization for so many different things. Health benefits, productivity, etc. So here's an idea. Think about these kind of strategies when you're looking at the overall health of your organization. That's my quick drop. Remember, don't think inside the box, don't think outside the box or in the box. We'll see you soon.