With staying healthy, a little preventive care can go a long way. As Benjamin Franklin said back in the 18th century, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
When you invest in health benefits and preventive healthcare via group health insurance, you invest in your employees, your best assets. You’re giving them the tools and resources to improve their physical and mental health. And reduce immediate and future healthcare costs.
The importance of preventive healthcare and the effects of employee health go beyond medical expenses. A workforce that’s healthy is more productive. Meaning motivating healthier behaviors can yield excellent results for your business.
It’s important to encourage employees to take preventive measures so a current illness doesn’t worsen, to stop the onset of any conditions, and embrace a healthy lifestyle. As you read on, you’ll learn more about why is preventive care important and more.
What Is Preventive Healthcare?
You likely engage in some form of preventive healthcare frequently. Be it regular exercise, seasonal flu shots, or deciding against that extra slice of cake. You take these preventive measures to protect your health and prevent future health problems. Without your knowledge, you engage in preventive healthcare to improve your health.
Preventive care is health screenings and tests when you’re feeling well. This is done for early detection and treatment of serious conditions that initially may not have any symptoms, like high cholesterol, high blood pressure, cancer, and more.
There are both short-term and long-term consequences of these illnesses going undetected. In the short term, it can impact the likelihood of hospitalization and death because of COVID-19. In the long term, there’s a possibility of negative health outcomes such as kidney failure, heart attack, or stroke.
If the pandemic has taught you anything, irrespective of age, an individual’s underlying health matters. So, it’s best to seek primary care to avoid such circumstances, get any ailments under control, stay healthy, delay the onset of disease, and reduce your healthcare costs.
Reading tip: Learn more about preventive care and diagnostic here.
Why Is Preventive Health Care Important?
Preventive healthcare plays a significant role in employees’ overall health and wellbeing. For starters, preventive care helps delay or even avoid the onset of chronic conditions that influence living a full and maintaining a healthy life. This is reason enough to embrace preventive healthcare.
If you need more, here’s another one. Primary care results in sizable savings in your group health plan by aiding employees to steer clear of surgeries, medications, and costly medical care services.
Early preventive screenings, flu shots, and more help detect any early warning signs before they become serious and potentially expensive to treat. This is one reason you shouldn’t overlook the importance of preventive care, and ensure you make the best use of your preventive care benefits.
What Are The Benefits Of Preventive Health Care?
Taking early action to prevent serious health issues from developing should form the cornerstone of any company’s wellbeing program. As you read, it saves money in the long run, as well as sets employees up for a journey toward increased happiness and productivity. Let’s look at some benefits of preventive care.
1. Reduce healthcare and claim costs:
Medical costs are only inflating, and when employer health insurance is mandatory, it’s best to encourage employees to make use of health benefits. It’s a way to proactively boost the health of employees.
Typically, group health insurance is looked at as a means for the insured to seek required treatment when ill. However, if you choose the right partner with good benefits, you can easily get group health insurance that also lays a focus on preventive care and boosting wellness in the workplace. Simultaneously, you can manage different costs like claims or healthcare expenses.
By implementing the right health benefits, you can get a substantial return on investment in the form of lower claims and healthcare costs. One study by Harvard Business Review found that employers can save as much as 86% by offering preventive care treatment that focuses on stopping at-risk teammates from falling chronically ill.
2. Bolster productivity:
Mentally and physically healthy employees show higher signs of productivity. Absent employees cost you both lost productivity as well as sick leave entitlements. Sick employees who come into work also pose a threat.
Presenteeism results in employees not giving their 100% and possibly passing on sickness to others. With the right health benefits like preventative medicine, you can lower absenteeism and boost productivity.
3. Attract and retain talent:
The lion’s share of job applicants takes employee benefits into consideration when they decide to accept to reject an offer. To entice the crème de la crème, an organization needs health benefits and wellness programs, along with group health insurance.
4. Promote positive mental health:
Employee health and wellness programs are designed to reduce health-related stresses among employees. There may be employees who have health risk factors like anxiety, depression, ongoing health struggles due to family history, and this can impact performance.
If employees have access to resources to actively improve the status of their health, they can predominantly focus on the job sans the added stress because of health concerns. Furthermore, health insurers who focus on preventive care help employers enhance organizational dedication and motivation in the workplace.
5. Boosts morale and improves job satisfaction:
A well-run organization is made up of employees with high job satisfaction. Of the many, the key to achieving and maintaining job satisfaction is wellness programs.
Opting for group health insurance with added benefits and innovative wellness programs dedicated to employee health demonstrates the company’s compassion and concern for the health and happiness of employees. In turn, employees feel that their organization cares about them, which promotes positivity and boosts morale.
Research on the hospitality industry concluded that employee health and wellness programs result in significantly higher job satisfaction. They cultivate loyalty among staff members and improve employee retention rates.
And since recruitment is a time and money-consuming effort, these programs also prove to be cost-effective in more ways than one.
Healthy Living By The Numbers:
Partnering with an experienced healthcare partner is one of the best ways to create and enforce all-inclusive group health insurance plans, along with preventive care.
Loop Health can help you with a budget-friendly group health insurance plan with a plethora of value-added preventative services. From added health and wellness sessions to an administrative dashboard to 24X7 claims assistance to communication support to preventive care for health outcomes, you get everything!
To learn more about Loop’s group health insurance and preventive care, click here to get in touch with our team. Time to be on the road to better health.
