Karen Seward and her team at Shepell•fgi are helping employers to tackle wellness ‘like a business problem’.

Mounting drug and healthcare costs, rising long-term disability claims and an aging workforce put increasing pressure on employer-sponsored benefit plans. Many employers have little idea how to contain costs while supporting employee health at the same time.

To address such concerns, Karen Seward and her team at Shepell•fgi in Toronto, a provider of employee assistance plans (EAPs), developed Prevention, an analytic tool and services program that integrates all of an employer’s data — drug costs, short- and long-term disability costs, employee engagement and demographic information — and offers a snapshot of the employer’s top health concerns.

Seward is this year’s winner in the Provider Leadership category in the Who’s Who in Workplace Health Awards.

“Employers were articulating to us the need to understand what was going on with their data so — instead of [having] all of their benefits programs in siloes — they could start working together [with vendors] towards really solving employee health issues,” says Seward, vice-president, business development and marketing.

The tool comprises three levels of reports. Prevention- Profile provides a high-level analysis of an organization’s demographics and pharmaceutical, medical and disability claims. It also highlights the leading health issues for the employer and indicates where to focus its wellness efforts. Prevention-Guide provides a detailed statistical breakdown of this information as well as specific recommendations by professional wellness consultants. Finally, Prevention-Map provides a full analysis, a health and wellness implementation plan and a measurement framework.

“The data tells us what [employees] are experiencing,” says Seward. “The opportunity was to bring all the vendors together, share the report, and begin discussions around initiatives and key messages that would speak to the issues.”

In 2002, Seward also founded the WarrenShepell Research Group to analyze EAP data and healthcare trends and empirically show the fundamental relationship between physical and mental health, a core element to Seward’s prevention-based philosophy.

The Prevention tool gives human resources professionals a voice at the executive table, says Seward. “Based on the report, we would then be in a position to get a meeting with the executives and say ‘here are the issues and let’s tackle this like a business problem,’” she says.

Seward cites the example of one client who was spending more than $1 million on heart disease. “The tool takes incidence rates and dollars and says ‘with all the vendor programs you’ve got, you’re currently spending $1.5 million on cardiovascular disease,’” she says. “That is a much different conversation than ‘my benefits costs are rising by 15%.’ We would never have gotten the commitment at the management level to drive these health and wellness initiatives if we hadn’t been able to quantify the effects of heart disease in this particular organization.”

More than 150 organizations across North America have used the Prevention model since its inception in 2002.

“We’ve been on the soap box on this for about two years now and if you’d talked to me then, I would have said ‘it’s something they desire but they’re not willing to invest,’” she says. “What I would say today is people have acknowledged now that employees are going to have heart attacks and are going to have diabetes so we need to do something about it. The relative investment, though, varies by company.”

For a PDF version of this article, click here.

© Copyright 2007 Rogers Publishing Ltd. This article first appeared in the October 2007 edition of WORKING WELL magazine.