GiftCard Partners Blog

As we enter the season of open enrollment employers are looking for ways to minimize health care costs and employees are already thinking about new years resolutions and how they can get healthy “after the holidays.” According to a Kaiser Family Foundation report, half of large employers in America require employees to submit to some time of biometric screening. However, it is important for employers to consider how required employee health screenings affect their relationship with employees. So what’s the risk? Employees are all adults, and they ultimately can choose when to go to the doctor. Some go to the doctor regularly, others choose to go less often. Still others might be generally healthy but don’t check in at the doctor’s office as much as they should. So requiring biometric screening can feel invasive and create the illusion of “forcing” employees to go to the doctor, potentially against their general practice.

The care that a patient receives directly after leaving the hospital is critical to keeping hospital readmission rates low. It is estimated that nearly 20% of patients are readmitted to the hospital within 30 days of being discharged and about 75% of those readmissions are preventable. There are various factors as to why hospital readmission occur. Most often patients are not seeing their Primary Care Physician while they are in the hospital and their PCP is only receiving a summary of treatment instead of a complete diagnosis with follow-up care recommendations. Low-income readmissions can potentially lose hospitals money with the odds being higher that another hospital bill will go unpaid. In 2015, The Affordable Care Act has mandated a financial penalty of up to 3% for institutions that have not complied with standards for reducing readmission rates. Incentives can play a huge role in reducing readmission rates. They allow you to reward patients for taking small steps that make a big difference between a healthy recovery and another trip to the ER, whether it be following up with their Primary Care Physicians or adhering to their prescription medication. Download our free white paper Reducing Readmission Rates through Incentives and Education to learn more on how to use incentives to reduce that 20% readmissions rate. Learn more about:

More and more employers are using wellness programs as a solution to rising health costs and even more are expecting to launch wellness programs in the coming year. But is our privacy at risk? Wellness program privacy is a hot topic and, with the slow development and implementation of standards to keep information confidential, it's no surprise. Wellness program data collected by employers is released to wellness providers and this non-confidential data could be abused for workplace discrimination, credit screenings, and even unwanted marketing. As more employers grasp wellness, they are pressuring employees to give unfamiliar 3^rd party companies detailed data about one of the most sensitive parts of their lives. In many wellness programs simply taking the health risk assessment could mean you are waiving your privacy rights. So, what are the best questions we should ask our employers to help retain our wellness program privacy and keep our sensitive information secure?

Employee health and wellness is important. We know why it’s important, but we often don’t spend enough time talking about how we can make employee health and wellness a part of our office environment. It’s important to understand what easy steps you can take to make your office healthier. It doesn’t need to be complicated, but it does need to give employees what they need to be successful in their healthy pursuit.

Top stories from the CVS/pharmacy October eNewsletter!

While the change of seasons brings us relief from the summer heat, we also start to see an increase in illness. October is the start of flu season, and on average, your employees will lose almost 3 days of work from the flu. Each flu season results in approximately $7 billion in lost productivity.