The Insurance Group promotes healthy habits to reduce medical insurance, care costs

In spring 2006, Callaway Bank CEO Bruce Harris was feeling sluggish and wanted to make fundamental improvements to his health. Specifically, he wanted to lose weight, reduce his bad cholesterol level and improve his blood sugar readings.

Harris decided to enroll in The Insurance Group’s wellness program.

In one year, Harris lost more than 40 pounds, lowered his cholesterol and triglyceride levels to a healthier range, and pulled his fasting blood sugar level out of the pre-diabetic range. He also increased his oxygen and his heart function by 25 percent.

Harris was so pleased that he and other Callaway Bank officials are talking to The Insurance Group about instituting a comprehensive wellness program at the bank.

“I’m convinced that, long term, this will save us a lot of dollars in our health-care program,” Harris said.

In the year since Harris began his quest, The Insurance Group has expanded its involvement in the wellness movement. In April, the company opened Optimus: The Center for Health, a wellness and disease prevention facility, on the first floor of its new office building in south Columbia. Optimus provides health education and features a well-equipped gym and locker rooms.

The wellness movement has gained momentum in recent years as the cost of health insurance coverage has escalated, making it harder for businesses to provide health-insurance coverage for employees. Many people with individual and family health-care plans have experienced steadily rising monthly premiums that exceed the rate of economic growth.

Disturbing statistics on obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases also have turned attention to wellness programs.

According to the Harvard School of Public Health, diagnoses of Type 2 diabetes in the United States will have risen from 14 million in 1995 to 22 million by 2025 if they continue at the present rate—a situation that would raise spending on health care.

The Department of Health and Human Services reports that 90-95 percent of all known cases of diabetes are diagnosed as Type 2, a type that can be greatly influenced by diet and lifestyle.

“Traditionally, companies want to focus on disease-management programs with people who already have the disease,” said Tom LaFontaine, co-director of The Insurance Group’s wellness center. “It’s the people in the low-risk [category who], if they don’t do something, are going to become high risk in the coming years.”

The Insurance Group, an independent insurance agency established in Columbia in 1898, has a vested interest in the changing face of health care. The agency has been as affected by the health-care crisis as its clients have.

In response, company leaders have made the decision to address not only the issue of rising health-care costs and insurance rates but also disease prevention at its core.

“From our perspective, we realized that wellness and prevention were probably going to be the next big frontier, if not the final frontier, for addressing these escalating premium costs,” said Jason Swindle, CIC of The Insurance Group. “So, we started evaluating some of these wellness and lifestyle management companies. A lot of them looked really good on paper, but we could never really get any of the proof in their results.”

Health and wellness start with education
The Insurance Group finally settled on working with INTERxVENT, a Savannah, Ga.-based corporation that partners with employers to educate employees about implementing lifestyle-management tools for wellness and disease prevention. INTERxVENT is a Web-based program that offers more than 70 lifestyle-management and education modules that are tailored to specific diseases and risk categories and a person’s readiness to make lifestyle changes.

“We wanted to feel comfortable with proof,” Swindle said. “INTERxVENT is one of the few companies with a track record that has been proven through scientific methodology.”

More than 40 published scientific manuscripts and abstracts, including the June 2002 American Journal of Cardiology, report on findings and data using techniques from INTERxVENT programs.

INTERxVENT services can be administered over the Internet, by phone or in person with a professionally trained mentor.

“The crux of the program is one-on-one coaching,” said LaFontaine, a clinical exercise physiologist with more than 33 years of experience in the fields of cardopulmonary rehabilitation, lifestyle management and disease prevention.

Harris said LaFontaine focused on his needs. “What Tom did for me may or may not be what he would do for somebody else,” Harris said. “He set me up for a year, and we would meet once per month. The thing that I liked about the program is that it’s very comprehensive. Tom gave me an exercise program and diet. He also put a third component in: He included a healthy-living approach.”

“One of the functions of the INTERxVENT approach is to offer something for everyone,” LaFontaine said. “There are lots of different levels, risk categories and needs. The INTERxVENT program provides participants with self-help kits, shortened types of mentor programs where they’re coached, and then more aggressive programs that are designed for those who are higher risk and have diseases that need to be managed better. You have options that can be offered to the whole population.”

Optimus, located on the ground floor of the Insurance Group building at Southampton Drive and Providence Road, is available to employees and to participants of the INTERxVENT program, along with tenants of the building and clients of The Insurance Group.

Optimus is staffed by four certified exercise physiology professionals and INTERxVENT mentors and provides heart rate training zones and equipment for measuring body composition, maximum oxygen intake, anaerobic threshold, muscular strength and endurance and other baseline markers. The facility contains a 600-square-foot exercise room and features comfortable locker rooms.

“The first thing you want people to do is take the Health Risk Appraisal,” said LaFontaine, explaining the initial step in the INTERxVENT program. “That provides a snapshot of someone’s overall health condition.”

The appraisal addresses what the participants eat, in addition to how much they exercise. Carolyn Skelton, the other co-director of Optimus, recently received the Young Dietitian of the Year Award from the Missouri Dietetic Association.

LaFontaine said that if an employer decides to implement the program, future success requires total participation by the company.

“You’ve got to have the full support of the core office and of the executives, who are the cheerleaders of the program. Research shows that the programs that were most successful were integrated within the company and within the culture of the company.”

LaFontaine said in the long run, prevention is the only way to reduce the cost of health-care premiums.

“Really truly,” he said, “not getting the disease is what’s going to work in the long run, thus reducing the demand for expensive medical care.”