Employee health can hold a major influence on an organization's productivity. In fact, 38 percent of all absences are related to health issues, and employers must understand the root cause of poor health and its relationship to absences if they are to improve productivity, says Julie Norville, senior vice president of national absence management consulting practice leader for Aon Hewitt, a human resources consulting firm in Chicago.

According to a recent Aon Hewitt survey, 60 percent of employers plan to create a health and absence strategy in the next three to five years. To do so, employers must first understand how employee health conditions are tied to time away from work through various claims activities.

"For quite some time, employers have done a lot of data analytics around health spend and pharmacy spend, the prevalence of health risk appraisals, biometric medical data to understand the health of employees and how to control the medical spend, but they haven't tied in the relationship to work performance and the ability to be at work," Norville says.