What Could Better Metabolic Health Be Worth to Your Organization?

Employers know what diabetes, obesity and other chronic conditions cost once they start showing up in claims. What’s much harder to put a number on is the value of helping an employee change course before those costs occur.

That’s becoming an increasingly important question for HR and benefits leaders, and it’s why we started thinking about a metabolic health cost avoidance estimator in the first place. Healthcare costs continue to rise, CFOs are asking harder questions about the value of benefits investments, and employers are looking for more than engagement statistics when evaluating their wellbeing strategy.

We think prevention deserves the same financial scrutiny.

That’s why Launch My Health developed a proprietary Metabolic Health Cost Avoidance Estimator. It gives employers a way to estimate the potential financial value of addressing metabolic dysfunction earlier, using their own workforce population and expected engagement.

Try Our Cost Avoidance Estimator Here

You can even download your results as a pre-formatted PowerPoint slide or PDF document.

Why We Built a Metabolic Health Cost Avoidance Estimator

In an earlier article, Before Risk Becomes a Claim: Why Cost Avoidance Should Define the Value of Metabolic Health, we explored a problem with the way we often evaluate preventive health benefits.

Healthcare finance is very good at measuring costs after they happen. Once an employee develops diabetes or another chronic condition, we can see the claims, medications, physician visits and other expenses associated with managing it.

Prevention is harder to see on a spreadsheet. An avoided diagnosis doesn't generate a claim. Yet helping someone avoid or delay the progression of metabolic disease can have very real economic value.

For an employer trying to decide where to invest limited benefit dollars, that value shouldn't be invisible simply because it is harder to measure. We wanted to find a responsible way to put some numbers around it.

What's Behind the Cost Avoidance Estimator?

If we're going to estimate healthcare cost avoidance, the assumptions behind the calculation matter.

Our estimator draws from publicly available, credible health and economic research, including methodology from the CDC Diabetes Prevention Impact Toolkit. The CDC developed that toolkit specifically to help employers, insurers and others project the health and economic effects of diabetes prevention.

We also incorporate published CDC data on obesity-related medical costs. According to the CDC, annual medical costs for adults with obesity were $1,861 higher per person than for adults at a healthy weight, measured in 2019 dollars.

We then apply conservative assumptions to those inputs.

One decision was especially important to us. We don't simply add the estimated costs of every condition associated with poor metabolic health. Obesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia, diabetes and cardiovascular disease overlap, as do many of their associated healthcare costs. Stacking all of them together could create a very impressive number, but it could also substantially overstate the opportunity. That's not the point of this estimator.

We're trying to give employers a credible, directional way to think about potential cost avoidance. It isn't a promise of savings, and actual results will depend on the health of the population, participation, outcomes, benefit design, healthcare utilization and other factors.

Can Better Nutrition Actually Change Metabolic Health Outcomes?

A financial model can estimate what better metabolic health might be worth. For the model to mean much in the real world, however, people actually have to make changes. Behavior change is a major focus at Launch My Health.

In our Tired of Fluff: Our Data and the Science Delivering Measurable Clinical Nutrition Outcomes webinar, we shared results from thousands of people completing our clinical nutrition programs. We wanted to look beyond whether people liked a course or finished it and ask a traditionally harder question: Did anything actually change?

For our Putting Out the Flame anti-inflammatory nutrition course, we analyzed results from 3,325 completers using the Alternative Mediterranean Diet Score (aMED), a validated measure of diet quality.

The results? 76% moved up at least one diet-quality adherence category, while 50% moved from Low or Low-Moderate adherence into Moderate-High or High adherence. Another 26% moved two or more adherence categories.

We also saw strong evidence that participants knew what to do after taking the course. 98% reported confidence identifying anti-inflammatory foods, and 94% developed an action plan.

Those outcomes don't mean we can promise that every participant will avoid diabetes or a future healthcare claim. We can't, and we wouldn't make that claim. What they do show is that nutrition education can move beyond awareness. People can make measurable improvements in diet quality and leave with practical actions they intend to carry forward.

For employers evaluating preventive benefits, that's a much more meaningful place to start.

A Healthcare Timing Question

Employers already spend enormous amounts of money on chronic disease. When do we choose to intervene?

We can wait until an employee has progressed far enough along the metabolic health continuum that the organization is paying for medications, disease management, specialist care and other healthcare utilization. Or we can invest earlier in helping people improve the everyday behaviors that influence their health trajectory.

Of course, not every chronic condition can be prevented, and nutrition education doesn't replace appropriate medical care. But there is a considerable population between “healthy” and “expensive chronic disease” - what we call the "rising risk population" and many of those people are in the workforce today. That's where we believe Food-Is-Medicine has an important role to play.

Teaching someone what to eat is useful. Connecting the dots from information to action; teaching them how to shop, cook and make those choices work in real life is the key. When those behaviors improve at scale, employers have an opportunity to address risk well before it becomes a high-cost claim.

CFOs Want Evidence. They Should.

Benefits leaders are increasingly being asked to defend investments in wellbeing, navigation, chronic condition management and other health solutions. “Employees really like it” isn't always going to be enough. Nor should it be.

If a benefit is intended to improve health, we should be willing to measure health-related outcomes. If we're making a case that prevention can help contain future healthcare costs, we should also be willing to show employers how that economic case is being constructed. That is one reason we made this estimator available for employers to use themselves.

Enter your total population, estimated rate of metabolic dysfunction and expected engagement. The tool will estimate your population with metabolic dysfunction, expected engaged population, annual cost avoidance, five-year gross cost avoidance, per employee per year (PEPY) cost avoidance, and per employee per month (PEPM) cost avoidance.

Change the assumptions and see what happens.

What Could Better Metabolic Health Be Worth to Your Organization?

We don't expect an estimator to answer every question about the value of prevention. Healthcare doesn't work that neatly. But it can make an important conversation more concrete.

If you're spending millions of dollars each year treating chronic disease, what might it be worth to help more employees change their trajectory before those costs occur?

Try the Launch My Health Metabolic Health Cost Avoidance Estimator above with your own population and see what the opportunity could look like for your organization.