NCQA ANNUAL REPORT HIGHLIGHTS WORKPLACE WELLNESS AND HEALTH PROMOTION
Focus on Employers’ Escalating Role in Promoting Healthy Lifestyles Underscores
Wellness as a Critical Component of National Health Reform
WASHINGTON – The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) today released its 2008 annual report, Putting the Health in Health Care. The report examines how employers – large and small – are increasingly supplementing traditional health benefits with innovative wellness programs that support healthy habits for employees, such as diet, exercise, stress reduction, injury prevention and active management of personal health through use of online tools.
"Improving the health of Americans is not just a worthy society goal, it is essential to our nation’s economic health as well," said NCQA President Margaret E. O’Kane. “To bend the curve of health care costs and improve the quality of care in this country, wellness needs to be front and center.”
As noted in the report, numerous companies are successfully making wellness and health promotion a centerpiece of their efforts to manage health care costs while reaping productivity gains as well. “Our own development of a Wellness & Health Promotion Accreditation program reflects the explosive growth of the wellness industry in the past few years,” said O’Kane.
The Wellness & Health Promotion Accreditation program was launched in December 2008 with 16 organizations committed to undergoing review. Two of those companies – a health plan and a wellness vendor – have already earned NCQA Accreditation and the others are slated for review this year. NCQA Accreditation will help employers and others compare wellness programs using standardized results and select a wellness program with demonstrated value and quality.
Featured in this year’s report are profiles of companies with innovative wellness programs, and expert perspectives on wellness, including:
- Peter Wald, M.D., MPH, Vice President and Enterprise Medical Director for USAA, a large financial services company headquartered in San Antonio, TX, with 22,000 employees, and winner of the C. Everett Koop National Health Award in 2006.
- Jeffrey Harris, M.D., MPH, MBA, Director of the University of Washington Health Promotion Research Center and the Health Marketing Research Center.
- Maria Beltramello, Aetna’s Head of Strategy for eHealth and Wellness
- Dean Ornish, M.D., founder and president of the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute, and clinical professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
The annual report is now available free of charge on NCQA’s Web site, http://www.ncqa.org/tabid/1052/Default.aspx.
NCQA is a private, non-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality. NCQA’s Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS®) is the most widely used performance measurement tool in health care. NCQA accredits and certifies a wide range of health care organizations and recognizes physicians in key clinical areas. More than 7 in 10 Americans enrolled in health plans are in an NCQA-Accredited plan. NCQA is committed to providing health care quality information through the Web, media and data licensing agreements in order to help consumers, employers and others make more informed health care choices.
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