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Top stories from the February CVS/pharmacy® Wellness Newsletter!

 Wellness programs continue to evolve into 2016, challenging employers to keep things fresh. This edition of the CVS/pharmacy® Wellness Newsletter focuses on using rewards and incentives to encourage healthy behavioral changes, resources on how to maintain engagement and secure long-term program success, CVS news and more.  Read below for more on what this edition has to offer.

Insurance broker involvement in wellness programs is on the rise. In the past insurance brokers may have helped human resources departments select and negotiate the best insurance plans for their workforce. But with the introduction of the Affordable Care Act and the incentives that are geared toward employee wellness, a broker’s job role is expanding. Now just how far that expansion reaches is still dependent on the broker. The graph below is taken from
RAND’s latest employer survey and breaks down the involvement levels that different insurance brokers have in their clients’ wellness programs.

Wellness programs are almost a requirement of employers’ benefits packages these days. Health and wellness has become such a large component of employees’ lives that employers have gotten increasingly involved in. But how can you measure your wellness program success? Here are three tips to ensure you can execute and measure your wellness program successfully by focusing on outcomes, accountability, and return on initial investment.

Premium reductions are becoming less effective when it comes to employee health and wellness programs. We recently wrote about how cash isn’t king when it comes to rewards and incentives, and the same can be said for rewarding and incenting employees for healthy behaviors.

Workplace wellness is a $6 billion industry. In today's age of technology, millions of American employees are sitting at their desks for hours on end. Behaviors like these have led to a growing rate of chronic diseases like obesity, high blood pressure, stress, exhaustion, and absenteeism, just to name a few. Implementing workplace wellness programs has become a vital piece in both maintaining and improving employee health. The Society for Human Resource Management (commonly known as SHRM) released a 2015 Employee Benefits Report that discussed the uphill trend in implementing workplace wellness programs, addressing preventable and chronic disease programs in particular. RAND Corporation also released a brief on wellness programs, titled  "Do Workplace Wellness Programs Save Employers Money." It took a closer look at the two most common components of a wellness program: