New tool can calculate companies’ potential medical cost savings
International employee benefits network MAXIS Global Benefits Network has launched a new wellness intelligence tool to help organisations to calculate potential medical cost savings resulting from changes in employees’ behaviours and lifestyles.
The idea is that this will enable them to quantify the impact that behaviour change could have on the health and productivity of employees.
The tool, MAXIS WIT, integrates comprehensive global datasets from the World Health Organization and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and incorporates actuarial assumptions that have been benchmarked against Technical Actuarial Standards (TAS) 100.
MAXIS WIT empowers employers and helps them to build an evidence-based case for funding and implementing targeted wellness programmes
It can be customised, which allows organisations to insert their own company’s values, adding in medical claims data, employee turnover and identified medical cost trends. The tool currently includes data for 26 global markets, including the UK, Russia, China and the UAE, and it has plans for future expansion.
“MAXIS WIT empowers employers and helps them to build an evidence-based case for funding and implementing targeted wellness programmes,” said Matthias Helmbold, Head of Technical & Services, MAXIS Global Benefits Network. “Caring for employees’ health and wellbeing is becoming increasingly important for multinational employers as it can help improve retention rates, reduce sickness absence and boost productivity. Targeting negative health-related behaviours with specific wellness interventions can help companies improve their employees’ quality of life while reducing medical costs, which continue to rise at a rate faster than inflation across the world.”
Helmbold pointed out that the tool isn’t intended to evaluate the quality or success of a corporate wellness programme but simply to provide an indication of the potential savings that could be generated by a change in employees’ lifestyles and behaviours. “This can be extremely useful when evaluating the benefits of one initiative over another or building a business case for implementing a behaviour change programme,” he highlighted.