Sep 25, 2015 4 min read

Health care costs are rising and now that Obamacare is mandating that employers offer health insurance, businesses large and small are feeling the sting. Employers are starting to come to the realization that well care is cheaper than sick care. If companies can keep their employees healthy by offering preventative measures and wellness education, they can save money.

With this shift in focus from treatment to prevention, corporate wellness programs are on the rise. Some programs offer on-site health screenings, discounts to gym facilities and free online nutrition training. Perhaps the biggest impact in corporate wellness has been the increase in availability of food and fitness tracking.

Knowledge is power, and this has never been more evident than when it comes to improving health and wellness. Food journaling sites like MyFitnessPal have made it quick and easy to track calories and nutrient intake. The mobile app for MyFitnessPal even allows you to scan the barcodes on packaged foods and upload the information into your profile automatically.

Some sites allow you to set specific goals for food intake, for example, reducing sodium or fat in the diet. By logging all foods ingested, the app can help you change your eating habits by telling you which foods negatively affect your goals. This option, paired with free or on-site health assessments, can help employees reduce food-related health issues. For example, if an employee is found to have high blood pressure, reducing sodium in the diet may prevent further action by a health care professional.

When you’re focused on calories in, you should also be focused on calories out. Fitness trackers make it fun to track daily steps taken and calories burned. These devices provide a visual cue to employees about how active they are throughout the day. They can be especially helpful for employees that have sedentary jobs and may need a reminder to move every few hours.

Many fitness tracking programs allow users to set up competitions between friends, making exercise addictive as well. Companies like DietBet have capitalized the competition-as-motivation theory by providing a platform for people to bet money against one another’s weight loss goals.

The best fitness trackers allow you to track both food and exercise while creating friendly competitions. Some of the most popular products on the market right now are created by a company called Fitbit. Fitbit offers a variety of products to fit every budget.

Some companies are capitalizing on the craze by providing their employees with fitness tracking devices. Target announced recently that it will be outfitting its employees with Fitbits and organizing friendly month-long competitions between employees. The winning group will get to donate funds to a charity of their choice.

Large companies are not the only ones finding benefits to this trend. Even Pennsylvanian companies like WebpageFX have taken advantage of the wellness trend by giving Fitbits to their employees as well as providing time for gardening and meditation.

For every dollar spent on wellness education, a company can save $2 to $3 in medical costs and lost time. With statistics like that, increasing the depth and breadth of corporate wellness programs is the financially responsible way for companies to go. Fitness trackers will play a part in the expansion of these programs. It’s been predicted that by 2016, most companies with 500 employees or more will include fitness trackers as part of their corporate wellness programs.

Companies like Target and WebpageFX are already well on their way to saving money by keeping their employees healthy. In the future, more companies will be following their lead.