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4 Benefits of Executive Health for Your Company

Executive Health

According to a 2021 Goldman Sachs study, 67% of companies offer executive physicals to senior executives, an increase of 8% since 2011. 

If you're looking at executive health providers, you have more than a few options. Executive physicals are offered by large hospitals like the Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic, regional health systems like INOVA in Northern Virginia or Emory in Atlanta, or concierge medicine practices, like PartnerMD

Some providers, mostly concierge practices, offer an executive physical exam as part of a broader executive health program that often includes membership for enhanced primary care.

Others, primarily major hospitals like the Mayo Clinic, offer just the executive physical exam.

Whatever the setup, executive physicals go beyond what insurance covers to help protect your most important employees and secure your company’s future.

But now that you’re interested, you need to answer one major question – what is the ROI of an executive physical going to be for your company?

Measuring the ROI of Executive Physicals

Since 2003, PartnerMD has helped countless companies develop an executive health program centered on an executive physical exam that delivers value.

From the Fortune 500 corporation looking to provide an executive physical for their C-Suite and all their top performers to the small business looking to offer it to their CEO, we’ve designed programs that deliver a meaningful and valuable return for businesses of all sizes.

When adding executive physicals to your benefits package, you should expect the program to deliver ROI in four main categories:

  1. Recruitment and retention
  2. Long-term business risk
  3. Health insurance costs (for self-insured employers)
  4. The health of your participating employees

1. Improve recruitment and retention by offering a premium health benefit.

Providing your most valuable talent with VIP access to the best care possible takes care of their physical health while also showing them that you genuinely care about them as a person.

In a talent market with record-low unemployment rates, you face stiff competition to hire new talent, and your top talent is recruited away constantly by headhunters. When it comes to recruiting and retention, consider this statistic from MetLife:

  • 73% of employees would be encouraged to stay with their current employer for longer if offered access to more benefits. 

So what would the impact be on your business if your top salesperson or CFO left for a competitor?

What is the value in keeping them at your company year after year?

Offering executive physicals as a premium benefit shows them how much you value them and helps keep your most important employees part of your team.

2. Lower your company’s key person risk by identifying the health risk factors of your key individuals.

Providing information and an avenue for your employees to reduce their long-term health risks won’t only help them improve their health.

It will help your company ensure your most important employees – the ones most critical to the success of the company – are not a heart attack or cancer diagnosis waiting to happen.

Or at least if they are, your company will be aware and can plan for the worst. This is commonly known as key person risk.

A heart attack or cancer diagnosis could result in six to seven figures in health care costs. A terminal diagnosis or death of a key leader can result in instability in your operations and market perceptions, plus a sudden drop in stock price if you’re a public company.

For small businesses, what happens if the owner or another critical employee can’t physically work for an extended period of time?

This is why many businesses that add executive physicals to their benefits packages now require top leadership (and even candidates for leadership positions) to have an executive physical every year.

Knowing their risk helps long-term succession planning and ensures your company is prepared should any health event prevent a key employee from working.

Executive physicals help your company manage long-term health costs.

3. Manage long-term health care costs for your employees and your company (for self-insured employers).

One of the biggest challenges for a company is keeping the cost of its health insurance programs down.

Everyone likes lower premiums. One way for larger companies that are self-insured to manage or lower your company’s long-term health care costs is by preventing the kind of health problems that create large-scale bills to treat – think heart disease or cancer.

An executive physical exam could provide your employees with knowledge of their risk years in advance, so they can actively work to prevent the issue.

As an example, according to the CDC, nearly 1 in every 100 men develops signs of heart disease by the time they are 45. That risk doubles by the time they are 55. For women, their heart disease risk starts to increase in their 50s.

So how valuable would it be for one of your employees, let’s say a 40-year-old male, to learn the calcium score in their heart is elevated, indicating a higher risk of developing heart disease?

With an executive physical, they could get a 5-year head start on lowering that score and preventing a potential heart attack before their risk starts to increase.

And if you combine the executive physical exam with membership for enhanced primary care as part of a broader executive health program (common at concierge practices), they’ll get improved access to care throughout the year.

By providing 24/7/365 access to physician care by phone, your employees avoid unnecessary visits to an urgent care provider or emergency room.

This lowers the amount that they are paying out of their pockets, and it reduces the number of claims and the average cost per claim for your health insurance program. It’s a win-win for both your employees and your business.

4. Improve the personal health of your participating employees.

According to MetLife's 2022 US Employee Benefit Trends Study, holistically healthy employees are 74% more likely to be satisfied with their job and 53% are more likely to be productive. 

But it’s hard for your employees to be healthier if they don’t have a complete picture of their health.

Executive physicals feature comprehensive, in-depth preventive tests and screenings that go beyond the basics of what health insurance covers to provide a snapshot of their health and their risks.

Your employees will get advanced cardiovascular testing, advanced cancer screenings, comprehensive blood testing, and more.

As the old saying goes, knowledge is power and this knowledge means your employees will not only know their risks but also be able to work to reduce their risks over the long term.

That’s where offering a membership option for enhanced primary care between physicals comes into play. By combining the executive physical with membership, you can get tangible results that demonstrate the value of improved health for your company. 

Executive Physicals at PartnerMD

As mentioned before, we work with companies of all sizes to structure an executive health program that works for them. We transparently provide the cost of our executive physicals via our online executive physical cost calculator

We customize every aspect of the program to make sure the right people are getting the health information they need at the right cost for the company. 

Watch this video featuring Mitch Haddon, President and CEO of ColonialWebb Contractors in Richmond, Virginia, talking about the value of their executive physicals.

Next Steps: Choose an Executive Physical Provider

Want to talk to someone about adding executive physicals to your benefits package? We're here to help. Complete this form and one of our executive health experts will reach out to answer your questions.New call-to-action