Pressuring Workers to live healthier lives

From the Wall St. Journal's "Fiscally Fit" column by Terri Cullen. How companies are fighting rising health care costs.

More Firms Pressure Workers to Adopt Healthier Lifestyles.

Last month, Stephanie Sobel joined thousands of her colleagues at drug giant AstraZeneca PLC in taking a free online health-risk assessment test.

Ms. Sobel says that she'd long planned to use the tool but never got around to it. This year, however, she had an additional incentive: In September, AstraZeneca began penalizing workers who fail to fill out the online assessment tool by boosting their health-insurance premiums by $50 a month until they complete the questionnaire.

The assessment tool asked questions about the 32-year-old sales and safety manager's lifestyle, querying her on everything from nutrition to her past medical history. After plugging in all her information, Ms. Sobel received an evaluation of her health and detailed recommendations on ways to adjust her lifestyle to improve her well-being. The result: Her health isn't too shabby but she could stand to take a daily dose of vitamins.

"I like how it divided up into two sections what my health issues are, but also highlighted what my strengths are," she says, "It made me feel good and encouraged me to keep at it."

Frustrated with efforts to contain health-care costs, companies are stepping up the pressure on workers to use diagnostic tools and take better care of themselves – or be penalized when they don't.

"We didn't want to go down the path of cost shifting for all our employees so we decided to head in the other direction, encouraging workers to use the tools available to help them contain health-care costs by making healthier choices," says Penny Stoker, vice president, human resources at AstraZeneca in Wilmington, Del. The incentive appears to be working: roughly 10,000 of the company's work force of 12,000 have signed up to use the tool.