HERO Happenings

Webinar:  A Community- Based Proactive Health Care Model for Small Businesses
January 23, 2013 1 PM - 2:00 PM Central Time
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Please join us for a presentation on community-based wellness programs for very small businesses (10 employees or less). Our presenters will be the Greater Somerset Public Health Collaborative (GSPHC) in Somerset County, Maine, which  in partnership with HERO, has developed a community-based employee wellness program that demonstrates how small businesses within a community can join together to offer their workers wellness activities that would not normally be economically feasible for groups their size.

Learn about this model and how it complements national health reform, which proposes models to allow small employers to group together to purchase coverage so they can align their wellness strategy with their medical benefits in the same way large employers currently do.   By creating a project that gave small employers an opportunity to jointly obtain worksite wellness, this group was able to develop a prototype of an employer-community collaborative approach that offers a full spectrum of health, wellness and medical care protection-along with the use of financial incentives- for small and very small employers.

Partnering with HERO, the GSPHC created a modified version of the Scorecard specifically  for these micro-sized employers to use as the tool to qualify for financial incentives based on their score. 
We encourage you to register for this session to learn more about this innovative and intriguing approach to making employee wellness and prevention programs available to very small organizations.

Winter Think Tank Leadership Roundtable
The next meeting of the HERO Think Tank will be held February 12-13, 2013 Westin Hotel, Atlanta
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This is a HERO members-only event.

Recent Articles
New Findings and Realistic Solutions to Employee Presenteeism
Corporate financial statements and annual reports highlight the effects of the rising cost of employee health care. It has become a substantial budget item that must be carefully monitored and controlled. Because it is a tangible cost, benefits managers and chief financial officers tend to focus these efforts on controlling health care costs. Yet a much larger employee expense and management opportunity lurks in the shadows –in the form of on-the-job productivity losses resulting from employee health problems, a.k.a.,  presenteeism.

The HERO white paper “Presenteeism According to Health Behaviors, Physical Health, and Work Environment” which summarizes the findings of our research is now posted on the HERO website.
The objective of this study was to identify the contribution that certain demographic characteristics, health behaviors, physical health outcomes, and workplace environmental factors have on presenteeism (on-the-job productivity loss attributed to poor health and other personal issues). Analyses were based on a cross-sectional survey administered to three geographically diverse U.S. companies in 2010.

This research is complete and has been published in Population Health Management magazine.  The research team on this project included: Ray M. Merrill, Steven G. Aldana, James E. Pope, David R. Anderson, Carter R. Coberley, and R. William Whitmer, and members of the HERO Research Study Subcommittee (Jessica Grossmeier, Melodie Carter, Greg Howe, and Steven Merryman).

“Guidance for a Reasonably Designed, Employer-Sponsored Wellness Program Using Outcomes-Based Incentives” HERO, along with the American Cancer Society, American Cancer Network, American Diabetes Association and American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine have collaborated to produce the first joint consensus document designed to provide guidance on the use of outcomes-based incentives in employer-sponsored wellness programs.

This publication incorporates research, practical application, policy perspectives and a set of basic considerations to help organizations that are considering or implementing this approach in their program development and planning.  has been published online by the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Please visit the Incentives Joint Consensus Statement page on the HERO website to access the paper and associated materials.

For more information on these articles and other HERO research visit:

http://the-hero.org/Research/Studies.htm

Recent HERO Think Tank Resource Center Library Addition (for Think Tank members only)
Become an Organization in Motion, Jack Groppel PhD and Joe Alexander, MM, MA
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