Employee Health and Wellness

Health Risk Assessment: Helping Quantify Employee Health help you quantify employee health

An Health Risk Assessment (HRA) is an important tool to help you isolate the value of strong Employee Health Promotion Program Programs.

Health Risk Assessment: What is it?

Does the term “Health Risk Assessment” have you puzzled? If so, then you are not alone.  Unfortunately there is no standard definition or format for a Health Risk Assessment. A health risk assessment is both a procedure and a document, too, depending on the context — you must answer questions and ideally undergo some simple Employee Health Screening and Biometric Testing to develop a document that describes what’s good and bad about your current state of health.

To add confusion to the situation, there’s a field called health risk management. Talk to an OSHA inspector about health risk assessment and they will likely assume you’re referring to an analysis of contaminants and industrial chemicals in a factory or manufacturing facility.

Health Risk Assessment: The Typical Health Risk Assessment

A comprehensive health risk assessment is aimed at producing a concrete baseline of a person’s health, and includes most of these features:

 blood pressure check,
 cancer testing,
 blood sugar test, and
 a thorough analysis of the employee’s health status.

Health Risk Appraisals would analyze the employee’s:

 lifestyle factors,
 health conditions,
 medications,
 functional concerns and abilities,
 overall quality of life,
 self-efficacy,
 physical fitness level.

It is important to measure the effectiveness of all Employee Health Promotion Programs. There are several very simple ways to measure Employee Health Promotion Programs:

How many attended the corporate health and Employee Health Promotion Program, and was there participation or a visible level of interest?

Use a short and simple pen and paper assessment that people fill out at the end of the Employee Health Promotion Program /presentation. Statements that are rated on a scale from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree) will give valuable information. Ask about:
 • The value of the Employee Health Promotion Programs to the individual
 • The style of the presenter
 • The presenter’s knowledge of the topic
 • The level of knowledge gained by the employee
 • Other areas that would be of interest for future Employee Health Promotion Programs

Examples of Questions about Employee Health Promotion Programs
 • This program provided me with information and/or skills I will use.
 • The presenter was knowledgeable about the subject matter.
 • There was adequate time for questions.
 • The methods used to present the information were effective.

Open-ended questions about Employee Health Promotion Programs may include:
 • The best component of this Employee Health Promotion Program was…
 • The component that needed improvement was….
 • I would attend another Employee Health Promotion Program by this speaker…
 • Topics I would like to see included in other presentations or Wellness Programs…

This would be a process assessment that reviews how well the Employee Health Promotion Programs were started. It is also important to look at health outcomes and cost outcomes of Employee Health Promotion Programs.

More in-depth information about the cost-effectiveness of Employee Health Promotion Programs can be found by analyzing data before and after Employee Health Promotion Programs concerning medical care claims, workers’ comp claims, sick time, productivity levels, etc. Health outcomes for Employee Health Promotion Programs can be measured by looking at health claims and sick time.

It is also important to look at the impact of Employee Health Promotion Programs on family members. For example, smoking by pregnant mothers may lead to the birth of a severely impaired child. This could cost an employer or health plan hundreds of thousands of dollars, an expense that could have been avoided with well-designed Employee Health Promotion Programs.

You can also compare the cost per employee of running the Employee Health Promotion Programs to the savings per employee. One assessment of Employee Health Promotion Programs involving 20,000 to 25,000 employees at New York City-based Citibank showed a return of $6.70 for every dollar the business invested in Employee Health Promotion Programs. The findings were based on a study of health costs and absenteeism.1

An ongoing assessment of your Employee Health Promotion Programs should be performed each year and additional periodic evaluations of Employee Health Promotion Programs should be conducted on an ad hoc basis. An ad hoc assessment of your Employee Health Promotion Programs might be initiated by a variety of triggers. For example, at the end of flu season, a business might want to measure its flu shot program.