Summit addresses PPG's ongoing health-care challenges

July 27, 2006 - Speaking at PPG’s first-ever Lifestyle Partnership Summit in Pittsburgh, PPG Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Chuck Bunch (shown at right) praised PPG’s health and wellness leaders for helping employees become smarter health-care consumers and encouraged them to continue the battle against rising health-care costs. Summit participants spent a day and a half sharing best practices, networking and discussing ways to improve employee wellness and reduce health risks and overall costs.

The total of about 120 summit participants included plant managers, human resources professionals and health and safety leaders from across the United States, Mexico, Canada and China, including many plant nurses who attended an Occupational Health Nurses' Summit the following day.

The summit goals, according to Lifestyle Partnership committee chairs Dr. Alberto Colombi, corporate medical director, and Tom Welsh, director of payroll and benefits, were: 

• To increase understanding of PPG's wellness-related issues and opportunities by plant nurses, HR professionals, facility managers and other wellness leaders throughout the company;
   
• To provide tools and techniques that help inform and motivate PPG people to change behavior and be better health-care consumers; and
   
• To share ideas, experiences and successes regarding wellness activities at PPG facilities.

"We are pleased with the summit's high attendance, especially by plant managers and international participants," Colombi said. "It showed genuine interest exists in learning how to motivate behavior change and improve wellness throughout PPG. Participants really seemed to enjoy and benefit from sharing thoughts with employees from other locations and other jobs on how to reduce health risk and health-care costs at PPG."

Welsh said the summit will help the Lifestyle Partnership committee meet long-term PPG goals simply because it truly engaged the participants. "By energizing and better informing these key leaders, we have already helped them to help employees, retirees and family members improve their quality of life and, as a result, stabilize corporate health-care costs."

A breakout group brainstorms ideas to promote prevention in PPG's wellness programming.

Five "breakout" groups leveraged the breadth of participants' knowledge and ideas. Each spent an hour and a half discussing how PPG and its wellness teams could help reduce health risks and related costs in regard to behaviors, prevention, benefit plan design, health-care efficiency and work performance.

Health-expert presentations focused on relationships between wellness efforts, measurable aspects of health, risk reduction and cost reduction. Colombi explained why employees should complete PPG's online Wellness Checkpoint health-risk assessment (HRA) and "know your numbers" regarding measurements that help quantify health risk such as blood pressure, cholesterol and body mass index (BMI). The HRA (available through the PPG intranet home page by choosing "Assess my wellness" under "My Health" in the "I want to:" drop-down menu) helps individual employees and PPG overall track wellness improvements and issues, Colombi said. But only if employees use it. "We need everyone to complete the HRA so we know where risk is highest and programs can help the most, both for facilities and PPG as a whole," he said.

Dr. D.W. "Dee" Edington of the University of Michigan Health Management Research Center (shown below, with Colombi) spoke about managing employees' health to manage corporate costs and introduced the concept of "presenteeism," or on-the-job productivity loss, as a corollary to absenteeism, or not coming to work. He said employees who reduce their health risks tend not only to miss fewer days because of illness or injury but also to improve their at-work productivity.

Dr. Bruce Rabin, medical director of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Healthy Lifestyle Program, suggested corporate and wellness leaders should serve as healthy-behavior role models to motivate employees. "Death is inevitable," Rabin said. "A life of ill health is not. Our goal is to improve the quality and joy of life for ourselves, those who look to us as role models, and our extended community."

Summit participants also heard from Bud Wise, vice president, human resources; Reg Norton, vice president, environment, health and safety; and Frank Archinaco, retired PPG executive vice president, who suggested in 1998 that the company pursue wellness promotions to help curb health-care costs, leading to establishment of the Lifestyle Partnership committee. Archinaco credited Colombi with the success of the committee and PPG's wellness initiative, calling him an "inspired" health leader, and said PPG could "look forward to great leadership" as he introduced Bunch.

"I want to make sure we have healthy employees and competitive businesses," Bunch said, despite steadily increasing health-care costs.

Because neither the current presidential administration nor the prior one has successfully addressed rising U.S. health-care costs, he said, the burden has been passed to employers, making PPG and other U.S. companies "rationers" that determine employees' access to health care. To boot, he said the health-care industry now makes up a larger portion of the U.S. economy than the manufacturing industry, and the gap is growing.

"The people in this room are PPG's front line [in battling health-care costs]," Bunch said. "I'm very supportive of the job that you've done and of the progress you're making.

"This [health-care problem] is going to be going on for the rest of your careers. Stay engaged, because you're doing a good job and you're winning a lot of battles out there."

Dr. Alberto Colombi, corporate medical director(left) and Dr. D.W. "Dee" Edington of the University of Michigan Health Management Research Center	From left, Dan Logan, director, employee benefits; Bunch; Frank Archinaco, retired PPG executive vice president; and Tom Welsh, director, payroll and benefits