As America’s workforce ages, the prevalence of chronic diseases such as diabetes, arthritis and heart disease increases. Many chronic diseases can be prevented by healthy lifestyle choices such as exercise, proper weight management, and smoking cessation. Increasingly, employers are taking a proactive approach to encourage healthy lifestyle choices to prevent chronic disease among their workers. Others are using disease management programs to improve health outcomes and lower the economic burden of workers who are already diagnosed with chronic diseases.

As more employers turn to care management strategies in their health benefit plans there is some evidence of relief in health benefit costs. Between 2004 and 2005, despite an aging workforce, the average costs of health benefits per employee dropped from $7,089 in 2004 to $6,679 in 2005. By focusing on care management and encouraging healthy lifestyle choices, employers not only improve the health and productivity of their human resources, they also improve the health of their bottom line by containing employee benefit costs.