Employers promote wellness

With U.S. health care costs rising, many local companies believe a healthy employee creates a healthier bottom line, and they are expanding their efforts in offering health-related programs and ease of access to health professionals.

Investing in employees' health is vital in creating a strong company, said Amanda Penn, CPM, manager, public and community relations, UnitedHealthcare Nevada, which includes Southwest Medical Associates, Senior Dimensions, Sierra Health and Life, Sierra Health-Care Options and Health Plan of Nevada, among others.

"We have a health education and wellness division of registered dietitians and other health educators who provide classes, training and guidance to our health plan members as well as our employees," Penn said.

In January 2010, UnitedHealth Group began offering UnitedHealth Personal Rewards as a pilot program to its 78,000 employees nationwide and their family members. It's been hugely successful, with 72 percent of plan participants earning points and more than 50 percent completing the work site biometric screenings.

Through November 2010, wellness coaching enrollment has increased more than 330 percent over the previous year's same time period while wellness coaching completion rates have increased more than 550 percent. Nearly 46 percent of the plan participants have lost weight, year-to-date, with an average weight loss of nearly 10 pounds per individual.

UnitedHealthcare's parent company, UnitedHealth Group, has entered into a partnership with the American Heart Association to establish employee walk paths for its employees at business sites around the country. The AHA also created an app that locates public and employee walk paths around the country as well for employees visiting other areas.

"We launched ours on our main corporate campus on National Start Walking Day, April 6," Penn said. "The Southwest Medical Associates chief of cardiology participated as well, not only creating walk paths here on our main campus but at all of our employee locations around the state."

Within UHC there are a number of other businesses, including home health care and durable medical equipment companies, which make up its more than 3,000 local employees, to which all of these programs are available.

All UnitedHealth Group properties and workplaces nationwide went smoke free Sept. 1, 2009. Greg Hershey, senior operating systems analyst for UHC, signed up for the free smoking cessation class offered by Health Education and Wellness on the Tenaya campus. He received the free Chantix pills and within one month of taking the cessation medication, he had whittled his two-pack-a-day habit to 10 cigarettes a day. A month later, he was smoke free.

"Shockingly, it didn't even bother me," he said.

He attributes his success to the on-campus HEW cessation group sessions and the support from his fellow co-workers and company overall.

UHG also supports its employees who begin a group program of their own accord. UnitedHealthcare employees who participate in marathons, cycling events and walks to support various charities and causes in our community banned together to form the group Team United Fitness, or TUF.

Don Giancursio, CEO, UnitedHealthcare Nevada, purchased T-shirts for the grassroots group to wear and has contributed to the success of the group in large part.

"UnitedHealthcare's mission is to help people live healthier lives," he said. "This mission starts internally with the more than 2,600 employees who work for UnitedHealthcare Nevada and its family of companies. Our employees are our greatest asset and we strongly believe in providing wellness programs as a key component to help our employees maintain a healthy lifestyle. We want to incent and energize our employees to become more aware of and accountable for their own health."

TUF activities include weekly group walks/runs, regular group hikes, cycling events, monthly team events as well as training and education support. The company has given thousands of dollars to support local charities and walks that their employees routinely are involved in.

"You name a walk and we have a team of employees that participate in that walk," Penn said.

Rebecca Eve is a supervisor for UnitedHealthcare's Health Education and Wellness division and enthusiastic TUF member.

"Hiking is catching on," Eve said. "I usually get anywhere from eight to 15 (UnitedHealthcare) members participating for every hike. It's a great workout, relatively inexpensive and it really does everyone good to just get outdoors for the day. People will start talking on the hikes and get to know each other better."

The group has created a Facebook page, "Meet the Flintstones," to encourage others, both employees and the public, to join them.

Many local companies offer rebates or discounts to area gyms, finding that if they offer some incentive employees will usually take the lead in their quest for better health.

Life Time Fitness, a full-service gym and spa, plans to open its first location in Summerlin in June. The Minnesota-based company will open a three-story, 140,000-square-foot facility at 10721 W. Charleston Blvd. near Costco. The construction was halted in the spring 2009 but has since resumed, and the facility is slated to open this month.

The high-end fitness facility will offer a junior gymnasium; nutrition coaches and personal trainers; full-service day spa; hair, nail and skin-care salon; indoor and outdoor pools; a bistro; climbing wall; child care center; and computer center.

Life Time Fitness currently has openings for a camp counselor, medi-spa laser specialist, personal trainer, volleyball league coordinator, ultimate hoops statistician, basketball court monitor, sales positions and a kid's activities team member.

Healthy employees are the key to productivity and retention as well as its continued local success, said Chad Henry, director of operations for American Medical Response in Nevada.

American Medical Response has rushed to the scenes of crisis for nearly two decades in Las Vegas. AMR and MedicWest provide emergency response and dispatch services, nonemergency transport services, air ambulance services, event medical services, managed transportation among other emergency services. The job can be grueling, both mentally and physically, so AMR has ramped up its efforts to offer complete medical services to its health professionals.

"We do a number of things to help our employees stay healthy or improve their health," Henry said. "We have wellness programs in place at AMR and MedicWest, including a smoking cessation program that we offer for free."

Employees are also offered discounts for membership at area 24 Hour Fitness clubs. MedicWest has a fully equipped gym at its North Las Vegas facility and both companies have a personal fitness trainer available for use by all of its employees.

"In addition to that, because our employees are our most valuable asset, we recognize that we need to give them health benefits that they have easy access to," he said.

Five years ago the company hired a fitness coordinator who puts together a biweekly employee education program to keep up on the latest fitness trends and provide updated information on new fitness features the company intends to incorporate.

"We recognized early on that our employees' overall health is important for many reasons and we have some ownership with that as well," Henry said. "We recognize that there are deficits, in lifting and other aspects of the job, which can create health problems if they aren't aware of how to stay physically and mentally fit."

AMR and MedicWest currently has more than 900 employees and hires EMTs, paramedics and other health professionals on a monthly basis. Go to www.amr.net for information about current career positions available.

Rising medical costs made one local company restructure its employee relations, with significant results in a short amount of time. Gary Kapral, senior vice president of human resources for Bally Technologies Inc., said the decision four years ago to bring in health educators and programs for its more than 900 employees has shown a considerable return to the company's bottom line in more ways than simply financial.

"Some of it is self-centered, it does save us money," Kapral said. "But we get it. What goes around comes around and you generally get a happier employee who is more motivated and who uses less sick days when you help them to stay or get healthy."

The employees' response was positive and immediate, with more than 85 percent signing up for the first online health survey in 2007 to assess what the company needed to do to assist its employees in getting healthier.

"Twenty years ago you had a harder time educating people," he said. "But there's so much more information around now it's really not hard to communicate with your employees. They are definitely interested and invested. They get it."

The online health assessment provided information on where the risky areas were for the company's diverse employment base, particularly in smoking and heart disease-related problems.

"What we found were a lot of employees who really didn't know their (health) numbers," Kapral said. "We realized most weren't aware of their cholesterol, blood pressure and the numbers that, if they are bad, can affect your health pretty seriously."

The company focused on education, creating health and safety fairs and incentives to attend. It's a constantly evolving work-in-progress Bally Technologies returns to annually.

"We made it easy on them to get their blood pressure taken, their cholesterol checked and all that done on campus so we could better understand what else we needed to do," Kapral said of the ongoing program. "All the while we started kicking up the smoker cessation program, we brought Weight Watchers on campus and some other programs that really started to make it fun, particularly our Buddy Up programs, where you find someone to walk with and lose weight with. It makes it much more successful if you have someone to share your successes with, we've found."

The Weight Watchers program and a reward system for those who lose the most weight in a given time period have been very popular with the Bally Technologies teams.

The company offers a smoker cessation program three times a year to help those who have quit maintain their nonsmoker status and rally behind those who are still trying to ditch the bad habit. The programs are subsidized by the company because "health professionals have told us the employees need to have a little stake in the game," he said.

The company stepped up to the plate when employees shared their desire to be involved in the valleywide Corporate Challenge.

"We support them if they want to be out there in these team activities around the valley," he said. "We are heavily involved in that, and it's been a great team builder."

This past year, Bally Technologies joined forces with the Nevada Cancer Institute. The institute brings its Hope Coach, a mobile mammography station, to the Bally Technologies campus to give its employees annual checkups.

"After we concentrated on getting people to know their numbers and save their life that way, we realized that a lot of people were not getting their annual physicals," he said. "That was something we also learned from our online health risk assessment, which has been really helpful."

The NCI also has 10-week programs that include a brown bag lunch and seminars on sun safety and other cancer-prevention education classes.

"We get a number of employees who participate in those," he said. "They are very informative and get us talking."

The company began to provide free or low-cost annual physicals at area medical centers to its employees, which was well received, he said.

Bally Technologies will continue to expand its medical focus based on what the employees communicate their needs are.

"They get a lot out of it, and so do we," he said. "A healthy employee means a happier employee and a happier work place overall."

Bally Technologies is currently hiring with more than 50 positions available, from engineers to assemblers and manufacturing jobs. Apply at jobs@ballytech.com.

"We are having a heartbeat of activity right now," he said. "Things look good."

Online assessments is the new trend for involving employees in their own health awareness, said Wayne Cassard, system director, human resources for The Valley Health System.

"Our employee assistant program, More to Life, is an online program that offers many benefits," he said. "It's free; there is information for nutritional counseling, fitness programs, healthy eating guidelines. Employees have the ability to access online, call a toll-free number, talk to counselors, get in shape, lose weight and quit smoking. It's very successful for us."

They also concentrate on mental health.

"We offer family counseling, legal counseling, anything for the mind and body," he said. "Both physical and mental wellness is important."

Being a provider of health care services, the company found it was important to start with its employees to build a better, stronger company.

Programs that are offered to the public through The Valley Health System are first offered to its employees.

"It's good for a number of reasons," Cassard said, "because healthy employees mean healthier patients."

And less sick days, which is important for patient care, he said.

"It gives continuity of care if the same employees are helping with the same patients day in and day out and are not home sick," Cassard said. "Healthy employees are here at work and it's a benefit for them and for our patients."