What is the Business Case for Employers’ Investment in Healthy Communities: Improved Worker Health, Lower Medical Costs, and Higher Stock Performance

Grant: #74318

Grantee: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Principal Investigator: Ron Goetzel, Ph.D.

Grant Period: 02/01/2017 – 01/31/2018

Budget: $250,000

This project is funded as part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s solicitation, “Engaging Businesses for Health,” which seeks to build the evidence base for private-sector investment to help build a Culture of Health. The goal of this project is to develop an evidence base on the value of employers’ investments in the health and well-being of workers and their communities, and the tangible attendant business benefits for private sector employers. The researchers will compare publicly traded companies that have invested in employee and community health versus those that have not and examine the five-year trends in employees’ health risk profile, medical expenditures and stock price. They will recruit 30-50 Fortune 500 corporate clients of Truven Health Analytics, build a person-level research database for the period 2011-2015 by leveraging Truven’s MarketScan data. In addition, they will compare companies based on their investments in community health using an organizational assessment instrument and apply software to compute stock prices trends for participating companies. Deliverables will include a project work plan and a final narrative and financial report. The grantee will also produce paper(s) suitable for publication and present findings at national research meetings and to other stakeholder audiences as appropriate, including the business sector and federal and state policymakers, as part of the deliverables for this grant.

Publications 

Developing Two Culture of Health Measurement Tools: Examining Employers’ Efforts to Influence Population Health Inside and Outside Company Walls
JOEM | Sept 2018 

The Stock Performance of American Companies Investing in a Culture of Health
American Journal of Health Promotion | Jan 2019 

Improvements in an Organization's Culture of Health Reduces Workers' Health Risk Profile and Health Care Utilization
JOEM | Feb 2019

Investment in a Company's Internal Culture of Health is Good for Health and Good for Business
AcademyHealth | June 2019