Put a real price tag on employee illness

You can claim “asthma and diabetes cost the workplace such and such per year,” but how much do health problems add up to for your company?

Now there’s a way to find out.

The “Blueprint for Health,” developed by the Health as Human Capital (HHC) Foundation, is a free online calculator that can show your company how worker illnesses affect medical costs and productivity.

What’s new is the level of detail this tool gives you. After entering some company specifics like employees’ gender ratio, ages, geographic location, etc., the program will give you a breakdown of how many absences to expect, what doctor visits and prescription costs will add up to, and how heavily your bottom line will be affected by lost productivity.

The one-stop shop offers a slew of criteria you can sort results by: Want to see what diabetes and high blood pressure cost over a six-month period? The program can give you charts and bar graphs to see the results.

Even better: The tool can be extremely important when pricing changes to a company’s wellness plan. You know that encouraging employee wellness can boost productivity and lower overall costs (generally speaking), but attaching a specific dollar amount might jump-start some changes. The return on investment for launching a smoking cessation or weight-loss incentive is only a click away.

Other helpful features of the calculator:

• Estimating total health-related costs including presenteeism and absences
• A breakdown of the cost of most health conditions (chronic or otherwise), and
• A productivity-loss generator that takes an employee’s salary into account.

To see what illness costs your company and what areas are ripe for savings, you can visit the Blueprint for Health Web site.