MAXIS Global Benefits Network, the international employee benefits network, has today launched MAXIS WIT (Wellness Intelligence Tool), a new digital service to help organisations calculate potential medical cost savings resulting from changes in employees’ behaviours and lifestyles. The tool provides evidence-based insights to help organisations quantify the impact that behaviour change could have on the health and productivity of employees. The tool was developed by MAXIS GBN in partnership with actuarial consultancy Habits at Work.
MAXIS WIT integrates comprehensive global data sets from such leading bodies as the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and incorporates actuarial assumptions that have been benchmarked against Technical Actuarial Standards (TAS) 100. The tool is customisable, enabling organisations to insert their own company’s values, including medical claims data, employee turnover and identified medical cost trends. At launch the tool includes data for 26 global markets including the United Kingdom, Russia, China and the UAE, with a pipeline being established for the inclusion of additional countries in future.
The tool has been designed to be easy to use. In just three steps, users can create a report that will calculate the potential savings they could make on their organisation’s medical costs. Having selected the country they wish to implement a wellness campaign in, users then see sliders representing seven health-related behaviours: exercise, healthy eating, sleep, smoking, stress management, talk intervention and drug adherence.
The sliders feature the current status for employees’ specific health-related behaviours, detailing the percentage who currently display optimal behaviours. Users can then set an improvement target for a specific health-related behaviour. Assuming behaviour change interventions are successful, the tool enables multinationals to estimate potential cost savings for each health-related behaviour, whether they choose to set a conservative or ambitious target.
Matthias Helmbold, Head of Technical & Services, MAXIS Global Benefits Network, said: “MAXIS WIT empowers employers and helps them to build an evidence-based case for funding and implementing targeted wellness programmes. Caring for employees’ health and wellbeing is becoming increasingly important for multinational employers as it can help improve retention rates, reduce sickness absence and boost productivity. Targeting negative health-related behaviours with specific wellness interventions can help companies improve their employees’ quality of life while reducing medical costs, which continue to rise at a rate faster than inflation across the world.
“MAXIS WIT isn’t intended to evaluate the quality or success of a corporate wellness programme but simply to provide an indication of the potential savings that could be generated by a change in employees’ lifestyles and behaviours. This can be extremely useful when evaluating the benefits of one initiative over another or building a business case for implementing a behaviour change programme.”
The tool enables users to check within their organisation which of the seven identified behaviours would be likely to have the biggest combined impact on the health of the workforce. Analysing clusters by geography, company experts can build a regional business case for wellness interventions and track outcomes against other markets to benchmark the success of interventions over time. The automatically produced reports can then be used to help build a business case for wellness campaigns.
MAXIS WIT is available to MAXIS clients who receive an annual health and wellness paid claim report as part of their global programme. The tool is accessible via the OneClient portal.
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