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Director’s Welcome

Dee Edington

Thank you for your interest in the University of Michigan Health Management Research Center. We are a dynamic, innovative and passionate team of researchers with a mission critical to the vitality of individuals, corporations, communities, states and even the vital future of our world.

The Center has been in existence since before 1980 and we continue our mission of studying health risks and behaviors in relation to individual and corporate health and productive outcomes. Our original work (pre-1980) centered on the value that health and wellness programs had on disease and job and life satisfaction. We expanded that focus to include financial outcomes although we still hold that Health Management is a human resource issue, “helping individuals and organizations become all they can be.”

Our current focus evolved out of our early work and now is centered on the impact of health risks and behaviors on the total value of health and productivity: i.e. what is the total value of health to an individual, an organization, a community, etc." The total value of health can only be derived from the sum of the measures of healthcare and pharmacy costs, and productivity including time-away-from-work (absenteeism, short and long term disability and worker’s compensation) and presenteeism.

Throughout this website you will find sections devoted to our excellent staff; the corporate members of the long-time corporate consortium; our published contributions to the literature of Health Management; and, a list of our products which are used in our research.

I am especially proud of the list of the concepts that I feel we have contributed to the field over the past 25 years.

Going forward we intend to continue to emphasize the importance of helping individuals maintain their low risk behaviors (50 to 80 percent of the population) as well as helping organizations create worksite environments that promote healthy and productive worksites. Finally, we seek to clarify the tools organizations have to accomplish this goal so that incentives, job design, worksite physical and social culture, benefit design and others are all aligned with a healthy and productive organization.

Key questions that will drive our research:

  1. What is the value of a healthy and productive culture to an individual, a family, a company, a community, a state and a nation?
  2. How can we create and how do we maintain this state of health and productivity within cost-effective parameters?
  3. What is the relative total value of lifestyle, cultural, medical and pharmaceutical interventions?
  4. Other interesting questions brought to light by our creative staff or those individuals or organization we interact with throughout the course of time.

D. W. Edington

Watch a video of Dee W. Edington discussing Health Management as a Serious Business Strategy arrow