Today, more companies are implementing wellness programs in order to improve the health and productivity of their employees, while at the same time reducing overall health care expenses. However, it is easy to think of health screenings as a commodity instead of what they truly are—health care.
Programs designed to improve health and lower health care costs only work if people use them. In an effort to increase participation, Health Management Corporation (HMC), a wholly owned subsidiary of WellPoint, Inc., researched what drives health plan members to enroll and engage in programs to improve their health.
At this moment in history, we have a real opportunity to re-invent and revolutionize our entire healthcare system. However, current proposals are nothing more than a band-aid, missing the chance for true healthcare system reform. The proposed "fix" does very little to keep healthcare sustainable 10, 20 or 30 years from now.
Disease management (DM) in the US can trace its roots back to the mid-1980s with the early work of California health plans and has come a long way since then. However, it wasn't until the mid 1990s that disease management became part of mainstream thinking, after several private for-profit companies introduced outsourced disease-management programs to large commercial health insurance providers. The "process/evolution" of DM in the United States has been and continues to be the major difference between disease management in the US and the UK...and other countries.
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