The report pulls back the curtain on the social risk factors employees experience based on where they live.
Employers can improve health outcomes and manage benefit costs by considering the geographic location of their employees, according to a white paper written by UnitedHealthcare and Health Action Council (HAC).
For the study, United Healthcare and HAC, a nonprofit organization representing large employers, used HAC’s claims data of 217,779 covered employees to analyze struggles due to social determinants of health (SDoH).
The first-of-its-kind study highlights key insights employers can use to customize health plans and improve employee health.
Key study findings include:
- More than half of adults (52 percent) experience one or more SDoH risk.
- The leading SDoH that adults experienced was financial struggles (36 percent), followed by social isolation (30 percent), food security (13 percent), and housing stability (11 percent).
- There were significant mortality rate disparities among employees working for the same company from different states, with the employees living in South Carolina being 55 percent less likely to reach age 75 than the employees living in California.
- Suicide rates were 46 percent higher in South Carolina than in California and drug-related deaths were also 52 percent higher.
- Sixty-six percent of HAC employees live in the 20 lowest-ranked states, but if they lived in the 20 healthiest states, the per member per month (PMPM) health coverage costs would be reduced by $61 million, which is seven percent of spend.
- Young employees are more likely to experience SDoH compared to older employees, with millennials (born 1981–1996) experiencing three or more SDoH risks. The most common social risk among millennials was financial (45 percent) followed by isolation (38 percent), food insecurity (13 percent), and housing (13 percent).
- Forty-one percent of children had a parent who experienced at least one SDoH, and those children had an increased rate of suicidal ideation and depression, higher PMPM spend, and more emergency department visits.
Based on the study results, researchers said employers can take steps to positively impact the health of their employees while also managing their costs.
“We have come to the end of an era where benefits and benefits strategies are developed solely on retrospective claims data and company culture and budgets,” the researchers wrote. “As health care and health care outcomes are inconsistent, employers must open their lens to additional data and micro sets of data. It’s essential that the geographic location of employees and the associated Community Health and SDoH data be reviewed and incorporated into health improvement strategies to improve the health outcomes, productivity, and associated costs of their employee populations.”