How Medical Fitness Management Can Cut Chronic Condition Costs

Chronic conditions are a significant cost driver for employers with just five chronic diseases or risk factors costing employers $36.4 billion a year due to employees missing work. But what if there was another way to treat and even reverse these costly chronic conditions? What if your primary care provider could prescribe squats instead of seeing a specialist?

With medical fitness, that’s exactly what is available to your most high-risk, high-cost employees and dependents. Keep reading to learn about how this clinical approach to fitness treats chronic conditions with physical activity.

What is medical fitness?

Medical fitness is a clinical approach to fitness that uses medically integrated exercise programming to address health issues, including treating and reversing chronic conditions.

This unique collaboration between fitness experts and clinical providers combines medical oversight with physical activity as medicine to treat medical conditions like diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, and more. In addition, medical fitness is a solution for employers looking to address specific high-cost employee health issues and bring down healthcare costs.

Who is medical fitness for?

Medical fitness is ideal for at-risk populations such as individuals with:

• • Chronic conditions
  • Multiple risk factors
  • Sedentary lifestyles

For many individuals, participation in a medical fitness program is the first time they experience success with an exercise program. This success snowballs and inspires them to maintain a regular exercise program and achieve their physical activity goals.

How is a medical fitness center different than a typical corporate gym?

A medically integrated fitness center differs from a corporate gym by providing an individualized, guided, multi-phase exercise plan informed by data to improve the health for the most costly populations. A study from the Medical Fitness Association showed that membership at a medical fitness facility was associated with a 60% lower risk of death and a 13% lower risk of hospitalization for members.

Participants are referred to a medical fitness program by a medical provider, with a warm handoff to a fitness professional. This experience is very different from a typical gym which individuals, particularly newcomers, are often left to navigate on their own.

What does medical fitness look like at Premise Health?

At Premise, our medical fitness programs focus on creating real relationships with our participants and using technology and data to help them achieve goals that matter to them. This process increases baseline fitness and helps members build confidence in their ability to continue independent exercise.

There are three main components to our approach that help members achieve their goals:

1. Member education – We give participants the tools and data to fuel their learning and self-realization, teaching them the “why” and the importance of physical activity every day.
2. Building confidence – By meeting the participant where they are and building on small wins, we help members develop confidence in their ability to succeed with exercise on their own.
3. Instill independence – Our program fosters lifelong behavior change so that members can leave the program and continue making progress.

How do our fitness experts create exercise prescriptions?

See our fitness experts in action and learn what goes into creating an exercise prescription for one of our members.

Medical fitness offers employees struggling with chronic conditions a medication-free, surgery-free option for improving their health. Traditionally found only in hospitals or specialized community settings, this solution isn’t often available in the workplace. Premise Health’s ability to foster collaboration between our medical providers and fitness experts enables us to offer this unique solution to your people.

Contact us to learn more about bringing medical fitness to your people today.