Health and Work Productivity: Making the Business Case for Quality Health Care

A recent study of productivity in the workplace revealed that workers spend on average eight percent of their workday doing nothing. This statistic takes on greater significance when we find that health problems impact employee productivity loss by an even greater percentage. In light of this discovery, a group of leading experts from the emerging field of health and productivity research argues that the expansion of health care benefits represents a substantial investment opportunity for employers.
 
Health and Work Productivity presents state-of-the-art health and productivity research that suggests interventions aimed at prevention, early detection, and best-practice treatment of workers along with an informed allocation strategy can produce significant cost-benefits for employers. Contributors cover all the major aspects of this new area of research: approaches to studying the effects of health on productivity, ways for employers to estimate the costs of productivity loss, concrete suggestions for future research developments in the area, and the implications of this research for public policy.

Ronald C. Kessler is professor in the Department of Health Care Policy at the Harvard Medical School. He is coeditor of several volumes, including, most recently, How Healthy Are We? A National Study of Well-Being at Midlife, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Paul E. Stang is associate professor in the College of Health Sciences at the West Chester University of Pennsylvania and executive vice president and chief scientific officer at Galt Associates, a medical risk management consulting firm.