Corporate Wellness With a Twist: Why It’s Time to Move Beyond Pharmaceuticals and Embrace Holistic Health
With a new wave of survey data recently published by the employee benefit consultants and industry groups, we get some insight into employers’ priorities for their healthcare strategy in 2025 and beyond. But frustratingly none of the highlights include an analysis of what is at the root cause of employee ill health that continues to push healthcare costs higher year on year.
After discussing escalating drug costs and the popularity of today’s “it” drug (GLP-1s) you’ll hear about new style pharmacy benefit managers, centers-of-excellence and specialized network strategies. While these initiatives are interesting, they are like using a single fire extinguisher on a forest fire. It’s time for a complete re-think of how employees are incentivized to manage their health and wellness.
Pharmaceuticals Do Not Generate Health
The majority of conventional doctors today have one tool in their tool box and its made by the world’s most profitable industry – Big Pharma. From the medical school curriculum to the “standard of care” that an insurer or typical health plan will cover, the system is rigged for commercial success. But pharmaceuticals will never make anyone healthier.
It’s well known within the drug industry that “the vast majority of drugs – more than 90 percent – only work in 30 or 50 percent of the people” as stated publicly by Dr Allen Roses, a senior executive of GlaxoSmithKline. When a given drug doesn’t do what a doctor has prescribed it for, another one is tried and often the patient will be blamed as a poor responder or their condition labeled as intractable.
If the drug were otherwise benign, this process could be simply dismissed as a time waster but in fact there is a far more sinister side of pharmaceuticals that is also buried in the marketing machine messaging: Pharmaceutical drugs, taken as prescribed, are the third leading cause of death in the US and Europe. Not to mention other damage and disability caused by “side-effects” which are generally down-played. Side-effects are often brought on by a depletion of essential nutrients out of the body and the blocking of important pathways, both of which leads to poorer health.
So, at best, pharmaceuticals are a band-aid to cover up a particular symptom the body is using to alert us to a problem. At worst they are actively contributing to declining health.
As an employer, with responsibility to both your employees’ welfare and the shareholders’ commercial returns, this is a very sorry state of affairs.
A Wellness-First Approach to Healthcare
Employee Wellbeing is somewhere on the HR agenda of most employers nowadays. But in broadening the definition to incorporate many aspects of the employees’ experience, the focus may have shifted too far away from the original motivation for corporate wellness strategies: to reduce healthcare costs.
Traditional corporate wellness was notoriously difficult to prove an ROI which may be why the goalposts were moved to measure employee engagement and broader wellbeing instead. However, I would argue that it wasn’t the motivation we got wrong but the execution.
Instead of appealing to all employees to eat better, move more and take time-off, we need to adjust the overall communication and benefit delivery structure. If the employer offers a traditional healthcare plan that covers pharmaceuticals, surgery and conventional doctors as the cornerstone of its employee benefit program, then that’s what employees are going to use when they feel unwell. Most employees are stuck in the old paradigm of “a pill for every ill” reinforced by that mainstay of the US pharmaceutical industry – direct-to-consumer advertising.
Those employees who are already convinced there is another way, find that their integrative or functional medicine doctor is not covered by the health plan, nor the high-quality supplements that can address their nutrient deficiencies that are contributing to the root cause of their illness.
A wellness-first approach educates the employee on the sinister side of pharmaceuticals and the difference in the toolbox used by integrative and holistic doctors. The design of the health plan incentivizes employees to focus on lifestyle changes and solutions that address the root cause of their symptoms. Communications highlight a culture of wellness in the organization with plenty of support and reinforcement to make the health plan the minor player of last resort for acute care and emergencies.
Spend Your Dollars Like You mean It
Money drives behavior. You need to incentivize your employees to opt for the solution that will make them healthier and make conventional healthcare for non-acute conditions unattractive.
Here’s some practical examples of how to shift more of your healthcare budget into your wellness budget and see overall costs plummet:
Instead of subsidizing unhelpful drugs like statins, GLP-1s and others pegged for type 2 diabetes, subsidize metabolism point solutions that reverse disease through lifestyle changes, coaching, technology and real results. From Vida, Virta and Livongo to Signos, Twin and Digbi.
Instead of subsidizing immuno-suppressants like Humira and its cousins, used for a wide variety of auto-immune disorders, subsidize point solutions that address the root causes and restore the patient to health. Examples include Well Theory, Ciba, MyMee and Parsley Health.
Instead of subsidizing psychotropic medications for mental health issues labeled as depression, schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder and anxiety for example, embrace one of the next-generation mental health solutions like Unmind, Lyra, Spring or Modern Health together with integrative doctors who get at the root cause of these disorders through nutrient deficiencies and lifestyle interventions such as those offered at the innovative Amen Clinics.
Re-think the high-cost fertility program where vendors are only too quick to start employees on fertility medications and push them towards costly procedures. Instead, educate employees on the common root causes of infertility (metabolic and autoimmune conditions) and highlight the holistic programs offered by vendors such as those already mentioned as the place to start.
Skip the traditional flu shots and weigh-ins, for a wellness fair offering cooking classes, meal delivery vouchers and a vendor line up of real solutions that will reverse ill health and truly drive wellbeing.
It’s still Corporate Wellness, and overall Employee Wellbeing is still the goal, but the emphasis has shifted. We are now addressing the root cause of illness and once you’ve got improvement in physical and mental health, the other components of wellbeing will follow naturally.
