What do Workplace Wellness Programs do? Evidence from the Illinois Workplace Wellness Study*

Abstract

Workplace wellness programs cover over 50 million U.S. workers and are intended to reduce medical spending, increase productivity, and improve well-being. Yet limited evidence exists to support these claims. We designed and implemented a comprehensive workplace wellness program for a large employer and randomly assigned program eligibility and financial incentives at the individual level for nearly 5,000 employees. We find strong patterns of selection: during the year prior to the intervention, program participants had lower medical expenditures and healthier behaviors than nonparticipants. The program persistently increased health screening rates, but we do not find significant causal effects of treatment on total medical expenditures, other health behaviors, employee productivity, or self-reported health status after more than two years. Our 95% confidence intervals rule out 84% of previous estimates on medical spending and absenteeism.

The impact of financial incentives on health and health care: Evidence from a large wellness program

“…Section 4 relates these health improvements to health care cost and utilization. With a simple difference‐in‐differences specification, we do not find clear evidence that program participation is associated with lower health care cost, at least over the first 4 years of the program, and this finding is consistent with the results of Jones et al (), who find similar results in a randomized control trial in a similar context. In fact, we find some evidence for higher health care cost over the first 2 years.…”

“…In one specification, we compare the passing rate of program participants between those new participants and individuals who have been participating in the program for several years, and we find that longer program participation is associated with significant and meaningful improvements in screening results, especially for men.Section 4 relates these health improvements to health care cost and utilization. With a simple difference-in-differences specification, we do not find clear evidence that program participation is associated with lower health care cost, at least over the first 4 years of the program, and this finding is consistent with the results of Jones et al (2018), who find similar results in a randomized control trial in a similar context. In fact, we find some evidence for higher health care cost over the first 2 years.…”

“…Although some form of wellness program is offered by the majority of large employers in the United States (see Mattke et al, , for a comprehensive review), there is not yet clear consensus as to the impact of such programs or as to which program design features are most effective. Although the potential for cost saving appears large (Bolnick, Millard, & Dugas, ) and some studies suggest that wellness programs are associated with cost savings (Baicker et al, ; Ozminkowski, Ling, Goetzel, Bruno, Rutter, Isaac, & Wang, ), others do not find a significant effect on cost (Aldana, Merrill, Price, Hardy, & Hager, ; Caloyeras, Liu, Exum, Broderick, & Mattke, ; Jones, Molitor, & Reif, ) or worry that such programs shift costs onto less healthy employees (Horwitz, Kelly, & DiNardo, ). On March 23, 2010, President Obama endorsed a provision created to encourage employers to implement more substantial standard‐based wellness programs.…”

How Do Summer Youth Employment Programs Improve Criminal Justice Outcomes, and for Whom?

“…This method relies on a bootstrap resampling technique that simulates data under the null hypothesis. It calculates the probability of observing results as extreme as the ones estimated given the correlational structure and underlying distributions of the data, and the number of tests run within each family of outcomes (Jones, Molitor, & Reif, 2018). Using this more conservative approach, the adjusted p-value for the treatment impact on violent-crime arrests for males is p = 0.073.…”

Integral Organizational Wellness™: An evidence‐based model of socially inspired well‐being

“…As a counterpoint to these and other positive findings (see next paragraph), a more widely publicized report by the RAND corporation (Mattke et al., , ) concluded that wellness programs have limited effectiveness (cf. Jones, Molitor, & Reif, ). The RAND report further concludes that previous studies suggesting cost effectiveness had significant methodological shortcomings (Baicker et al., ).…”