For Nationwide®, a company dedicated to helping people protect their most important assets — including their health and well-being — fulfilling this need for integration became more than a goal, it became a reason to be.
From promise to platform. As a first step, Nationwide looked within its own absence management offering as the entry point to the "continuum of care" we envisioned. Monitoring unplanned absences can indicate when employees might need health coaching or assistance with disease management, and provide the opportunity for earlier intervention. But until now, no company had thought to use absence management this way. While most companies engage with an employee only after a claim has been filed or a health risk assessment has been completed, we identified more and better ways to engage employees.
Leveraging our disability expertise, we started providing specialized disease and medical management services by being the first to provide an integrated disease and disability management offering. With meaningful, personal contact with a dedicated nurse health coach, employees could now return to work—and good health—more quickly and effectively than ever before.
Acknowledging this enhancement to our continuum of care, we brought our businesses together in mid-2006 under a new name that speaks directly to the promise we deliver — Nationwide Better HealthSM.
More-recent service enhancements —including health screenings, our Health Check health risk assessment and lifestyle coaching—have enabled us to strengthen our promise of true integration. Because health promotion is the entry to the health management relationship, and it’s the connection between health promotion and disease management that provide the most opportunities to utilize our integrated offering.
