Health risk assessments (HRAs) are an important tool to help you isolate the value of strong corporate wellness programs. In our twenty-plus years of health testing and analysis as EmployeeWellnessUSA and parent company HeathcheckUSA, we’ve found that executive leadership is best at assessing risk in a rigorous, bottom-line-oriented manner — which is exactly what health risk assessments do for you.

Health risk assessments: what’s an HRA?

HRAs (health risk assessments) got you mystified? They’re a bit of a puzzle because there’s no unified standard for health risk assessments. A health risk assessment is both a procedure and a document, too, depending on the context — you must answer questions and ideally undergo some simple biometric data collection to develop a document that describes what’s good and bad about your current state of health and wellness.

To add confusion to the situation, there’s a heritage of industrial health risk management to the term “health risk assessment.” Talk to an OSHA inspector about health risk assessments and she’ll assume you’re referring to an analysis of contaminants and industrial chemicals in a factory or manufacturing facility.

Health risk assessments: a typical HRA

However, even though there’s no government or agency mandate telling you what should be in your company’s health risk assessments, the employee wellness professionals at EmployeeWellnessUSA agree that a complete, comprehensive health risk assessment is aimed at producing a concrete baseline of a person’s health, and includes most of these features:

• a blood pressure test to find possible cardiovascular disease,
• a blood type test so the employee can receive prompt transfusions if an accident does happen to occur at the workplace,
• a cancer test to detect this insidious killer before it can cause harm,
• a blood glucose diabetes test that can detect this common disease, and
• a thorough investigation of the employee’s health management status.

The investigation ideally would analyze the employee’s:

• lifestyle factors,
• symptoms and ailments,
• pharmaceutical needs and prescriptions,
• functional abilities,
• quality of life,
• self-efficacy,
• fitness proclivities and interest level,
• clinical information,
• and fitness biometrics.

Health risk assessments: what next?

If your organization is pondering the costs and benefits of health risk assessments, contact a wellness expert at EmployeeWellnessUSA. We’d be happy to provide you with no-obligation advice about how to go about planning a corporate wellness program and improving the health of your workforce while augmenting morale and reducing your health insurance costs at the same time.

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