It is common for companies to offer their employees regular medical health examinations. But recently, these reactive examinations have been widely discussed and started to be compared with proactive digital health checks – which have proven to be both effective and profitable.
The costs of poor health in Swedish companies are growing explosively and today amount to 350 billion SEK per year. In addition to the suffering of individuals, poor health is a major brake on corporate profitability. The reasons for these high figures are that most companies work reactively with ill health; resources are deployed when problems have already arisen.
Medical health examinations can help reduce anxiety and, to some extent, detect existing health problems such as high cholesterol or blood sugar levels. Employees also receive reference values that they can compare with future tests. But from a corporate perspective, reactive measures will not be economically justifiable in relation to the health effects.
There are primarily three major health areas that account for most of the ill health in Swedish companies today: stress and psychosocial factors, bodily pain (such as back pain and joint pain), and lifestyle habits (such as physical activity, alcohol and tobacco use). But this usually does not show up in companies’ sickness absence figures. Employees affected by the above often remain at work – but perform worse in terms of reduced productivity, efficiency and overall work capacity. These are therefore the parameters that companies can gain real value from measuring and changing. For a company to claim it has no problems in its operations because of low sickness absence figures is, in other words, wrong and an outdated notion.
An effective solution that more companies have started to use instead of medical health examinations is digital health checks like the one we work with at Wellr. By including, for example, lifestyle habits, stress levels and pain in the assessment, exactly those parameters that we know cause ill health in companies are evaluated – which provides a clear and more truthful picture.
But the greatest advantage of these values is that companies can actually work to change them. By, for example, improving and adjusting guidelines regarding the work environment and stress-related problems, increasing knowledge about lifestyle habits, and inspiring and making it easier for employees to increase their level of physical activity, it is possible with relatively small means to create major long-term changes.
