4 reasons to invest in employee health education

Trivia question: What is the only expense line item in every company for which employees at every level are handed an unlimited budget—with no training in how to spend it/?

The answer, of course, is health care. So why not train employees to spend their/your money wisely?

Answering that question is the goal of employee health literacy.  After all, wiser employees should make healthier decisions, right? And healthier decisions should save money – especially because America is the most overscreened, overtested, overdiagnosed, overtreated, and overmedicated society ever.

Further, your clients already believe that persuading employees to try to change attitudes/behaviors to gradually improve their health will eventually save money.

Employee health education turbocharges that process. Health education can change behaviors today in order to get immediate health care savings starting as early as tomorrow.

The four reasons

Don’t believe immediate behavior change is possible?  To change your mind, here are four reasons to invest in employee education, in the form of a four-question quiz. Take it, and see if your own attitudes, behaviors, and/or future health care decisions could change:

• Of skim, whole, soy, and almond, which popular “milk” is best for avoiding diabetes?
• To the nearest 25%, roughly what percentage of cavities need to be filled?
• What is the only way to avoid getting surprise bills for emergency visits and admissions?
• As compared to an X-ray, roughly how much radiation does a CT scan have?

The first answer is whole milk. Soy and almond milks are full of sugar. Milk has sugar (lactose), too. The absence of fat in skim milk causes milk sugar to spike your blood sugar.  Whole milk “buffers” this spike with fat.

Second, only 25% or fewer cavities still need to be drilled-and-filled. Instead, an FDA-approved solution called silver diamine fluoride (SDF) can be painted on all but the deepest or most awkwardly situated cavities to arrest the decay and keep the remaining enamel intact. Unfortunately, the very low cost of this completely painless 5-minute procedure means that most dentists will only do it if they are asked t. And some will resist even when they are asked.

To put this in perspective, a 10,000-employee company is probably financing 1,000 cavities a year, or about three a day. Once employees learn they don’t have to do this, that number should immediately fall by half or more, saving enough money to pay for an entire health literacy program.

Third, the #1 financial fear of employees is surprise medical bills for a major medical event. The only way to avoid them is not to sign the financial consent form but rather to give them an modified form to sign instead. Surprise bills, at least for emergency admissions, visits, and deliveries (in total, these interventions account for the majority of them), are now completely avoidable, according to the New York Times. Use health literacy education to teach employees how to avoid them, and they go away.

Finally, if you guessed that CT scans emit more than 100 times as much radiation as an X-ray, congratulations. If you’ve ever had a CT scan, do you remember being advised of the radiation hazards? Absent employee education, people assume that something with a harmless-sounding name like “scan” is, indeed, harmless. Yet, due largely to their profitability, scans are performed on Americans twice as often as on Europeans, with no measurable difference in outcomes other than to their and their employers’ bank accounts.

So now you’ve just learned four reasons to invest in employee education, meaning four ways that will pretty much immediately change your own behaviors/attitudes – and likely those of most employees. If you’re drinking skim or eating nonfat yogurt sweetened with sugar, you’re green-lighted to switch to the tastier full-fat variety. You’ll probably never get a cavity filled again, you’ll know your rights in the ER, and next time a doctor says you should get a scan, you’ll ask a few questions first.

Related: How much do employees really know about dental health?

Those four reasons are the tip of the iceberg. Health literacy quizzes can teach employees how to use their benefits, distinguish free-standing ERs from urgent care centers, and even circumvent carrier policies against “steerage” (usually with the carrier’s implicit approval!) with questions designed to showcase the lower-cost, higher-quality providers within the network.

Employee engagement

In addition to the obvious cost savings from avoiding overutilization, consider that other elusive goal: employee engagement. WillisTowersWatson reports that most employees dislike wellness enough to give it the lowest Net Promoter Score an industry has ever recorded:

This is not an aberration. One union even went on strike over their wellness program (ironically, one of the best such programs), while the Penn State faculty staged a famous revolt against theirs that made national news.

By contrast, many employees actually like taking quizzes so much that some health education vendors actually guarantee engagement.  Also boosting engagement is that fact that no employee need divulge personal health information in order to participate. Plus, the inherently fun nature of trivia means that incentives need only be modest, if they are offered at all.

Behavior change…cost savings…engagement. What’s there not to like? Well, as a broker, you may be disappointed to hear that these programs are so inexpensive that even generous percentage commissions don’t add up to much. Certainly not like diabetes companies that disclose $100 million a year in payments to “channel partners” such as yourselves. But as brokers move to a more consultative model, cost-effective outcomes become paramount. And what better way to achieve them than teaching employees how to use all their health benefits wisely?

Al Lewis is CEO and, more importantly, Quizmeister-in-Chief, of Quizzify, a leading employee health education company.