Truven Health Analytics Develops Solution to Evaluate Wellness Program Effectiveness
ANN ARBOR -- Truven Health Analytics, formerly the health care business of Thomson Reuters, today announced, in collaboration with Emory University, the release of a new model to evaluate the return on investment of population health and wellness programs.
The Truven Health ROI Model is designed to help organizations identify which health risks are most prevalent and costly to their company, quantify the relationships between modifiable risk factors and medical expenditures, and develop cost-beneficial health promotion and disease prevention programs based on the results.
The Truven Health ROI Model incorporates organization-specific demographic, health risk, and program impact data, plus data from peer-reviewed studies. It shows the relationship between health risk and cost, and predicts cost savings from programs designed to address 10 modifiable health risks: high blood glucose, obesity, physical inactivity, depression, poor nutrition and eating habits, tobacco use, high total cholesterol, high stress, high blood pressure, and high alcohol consumption. The model incorporates both prospective and retrospective estimates to calculate the financial return of a company's wellness program.
"We know that individuals with one risk for a specific problem often have additional risks also associated with that problem. For example, there are seven combined risk factors that contribute to heart disease: obesity, high stress, tobacco use, high blood pressure, high blood glucose, high total cholesterol, and physical inactivity," said Ron Goetzel, research professor at Emory University, director of the Institute for Health and Productivity Studies, and vice president of consulting and applied research at Truven Health Analytics. "Our research estimates the total costs for employees with these combined risks to be 214 percent higher per employee per year, compared to workers without these risk factors. By helping organizations identify the cost of modifiable health habits, we can help businesses develop programs that address the root causes."
Truven Health Analytics, in partnership with the Emory University Institute for Health and Productivity Studies, conducts empirical research on the relationship between health, medical costs, and worker productivity. The empirical data upon which the ROI Model is built is derived from the original Health Enhancement Research Organization study that was published in 1998 in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Updated findings were published in the November 2012 issue of Health Affairs.
Truven Health Analytics delivers information, analysis and services to the healthcare industry. Truven has more than 2,000 employees around the world.
For more information, please visit www.truvenhealth.com.
