ERC Health Case Study

ERC Health helps local non-profit City Mission improve employee wellness, cut health insurance costs

ERC Health assesses company health insurance challenges

The City Mission initially began it's wellness program activities to take advantage of the 3% renewal credit program available to ERC Health member companies. They were facing many challenges internally, including:

• The results from their annual Health Assessment pointed to very little improvement in the overall health of the staff. In some of the health risk areas measured, the staff's health was worsening.
• Annual health assessment results told the executive team that the majority of staff did not exercise enough to improve health risks.

ERC Health identifies opportunities

The City Mission had an opportunity to change the culture within its organization. Evidence suggests that this type of change can also spread to the community and encourage positive change throughout a frequently underserved population.

Being an ERC Health Member, The City Mission has access to a number of resources that would help them achieve their goal, including to an onsite wellness coach and free fitness club memberships.

ERC Health outlines goals of health insurance initiative

The City Mission wanted to increase participation in health prevention programming, improve healthy habits, improve presenteeism and productivity, decrease preventable disease risk and have a better education program for disease prevention.
In addition, they wanted employees to make exercising at least 3 days a week to become a normal habit of the entire staff.

ERC Health provides strategic health insurance solution

• The first initiative they introduced was an incentive program for employees to commit to exercising 3 times a week and having 1 wellness consultation (in-person or over the phone) with their onsite wellness coach each month.
• To encourage participation, a 50% reduction in their 20% contribution towards the cost of their medical insurance was offered.
• For employees that did not participate on the medical plan, they gave them a cash bonus equivalent to the cost of employee only membership at an Anthem sponsored fitness center.
• The ERC Health Wellness Coach developed a form to track incentive and accountability to help encourage employee participation.

Results of ERC Health's health insurance solution

In the first 6 months of 2010, 98% of employees participated in the program. They had 272 face to face meetings with the Wellness Coach and lost a total of 405 pounds with 60% of the employees reporting weight loss. 45 employees improved exercise frequency and 26 employees improved their Body Mass Index score by a total of 43 points.