Health is among the basic needs essential to every human. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle should be one of the significant aspirations in anyone’s life. Doctors often encourage us to eat balanced diets and exercise to be healthy. However, diseases and illnesses are bound to happen hence the importance of integrative health. Because of the growing popularity of integrative health, it’s critical that companies create integrative benefits packages.
Integrative health is a holistic approach to well-being, taking into account all the dimensions of employees’ lives, including physical and psychological aspects. Making integrative health accessible to employees creates a happier, healthier, and more productive workforce. Here are some benefits to an integrative health approach and why they should be a focus in your benefits offering.
The Integrated Care Approach
Integrative health incorporates all the aspects of the whole person, including mental, physical, social, and spiritual needs. If one element is unwell, it affects the overall health. For instance, when employees are stressed, which is a mental aspect, it may cause headaches or other physical symptoms such as muscle pain. The stress from 2020 led to increased popularity of mental health and financial wellness benefits in benefit packages. This highlights the importance of thinking about an integrated benefits strategy. Not only is it important to support your employees’ physical health, but their overall health as well.
By combining the mental, physical, and social needs of a patient, integrative health addresses the long-term influences that may affect the patient in the future. With such, the patients not only get well but also learn how to live well. For instance, they know how the behavioral, psychosocial, biological, and environmental factors interplay and influence their health.
Why Companies Should Focus on Integrative Care
Along with supporting the general well-being of the workforce, integrative benefits help businesses. A focus on “person-centered” care not only creates more productive employees but more satisfied employees as well. Additionally, an integrative benefits approach can reduce healthcare costs. Integrative care can help with employee back pain and sleep issues as well as drive down pharmaceutical costs. All in all, a focus on integrative care can set your workforce up for long-term health.
To get started with a heightened focus on integrative care, interview employees. What types of benefits are important to them? One of the key benefits trends in 2020 was an increase in mental health and financial wellness benefits. Before adding these to your benefits offering, make sure they’re valuable and accessible to employees. Consider how other benefits or programs can help employee well-being to create a holistic and valuable solution.
Make Care Options Easy to Access
Once your benefits team has an effective integrative health offering prepared, it’s time to make sure employees know where to go and how to access the solution. A good first step is making sure to select providers that offer a centralized health monitoring platform. These types of solutions collect employees’ appointment notes, prescriptions, and providers in a single place.
A virtual engagement solution like Benefits Zone is another great component to an integrated health offering. The Benefits Zone solution can house all of the components of a company’s benefits offering. With an easy-to-use app, employees know exactly where to go to get any information they need on their benefit package. Additionally, Benefits Zone provides companies with valuable engagement metrics to help them track the interest in various benefit components as well as highlight possible opportunities to improve the plan.
If you’re ready to take an integrative approach to benefits and want employees to be able to easily access those benefits us, schedule a demo today.
