Daniel J. Conti, PhD, Managing Director, Employee Assistance & WorkLife Program, JP Morgan Chase & Co
This year’s EAPA conference did what it always does; it got me all pumped up. And, this year the opening keynote address was delivered by a leader in the employee assistance program (EAP) field, Dan Conti, PhD.
Dan is the Managing Director of the Employee Assistance & Work Life Programs at JP Morgan Chase, the parent company of the second largestbank in the United States. His talk was titled “Making the EAP Case in Difficult Times: A Data-Driven Look at the Opportunities!”
The session highlighted the value of EAPs in general but specifically he focused on the value of an EAP during turbulent economic times in the financial industry. What was even more impressive was that he gave data. Granted, his data is specifically from one organization, but this organization has 250,000 worldwide employees, of which 180,000 are domestic. The employees are not homogeneous either, as they include both white collar (bank executives) and blue collar (maintenance, etc.) workers — so they do make up a cross-section of the working population. Finally, since Dan operates the EAP within the financial services industry, anecdotes are not enough to justify the program; numbers, statistics and cost data are.
During the discussion, he shared a lot of great information and statistics about how psychiatric or behavioral issues effect people, their cost to organizations, and what his employee assistance program has done to address those issues. Some of the most compelling statistics included:
- Anti-depressants are the 2nd or 3rd leading cost/expenditure of all Pharmacy Plan Costs. This is true for the number of prescriptions written, the number of member claims and the total net cost.
- In 1990, depression was the 4th leading cause of worldwide disability. By 2020, Depression will rank 2nd.
- Mental Impairment has become the 2nd largest reason for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) awards.
- In terms of Short Term Disability (STD), a psychiatric diagnosis is the 2nd leading cause of an STD event, 2nd in total STD days and the longest average duration. What’s even more interesting, the number one STD event is pregnancy. So, if you remove pregnancy from STD, then behanvioral health diagnoses are the #1 event.
I don’t know about you, but I find these numbers staggering and an excellent argument for why organizations should be addressing them. It makes sense from the perspective of lowering health care costs (all, not just behavioral health costs), disability claims costs, and ADA claims not to mention increasing productivity and profitability.
There’s a lot more to tell, but I’ll break that up into another post. Stay tuned for “the rest of the story” about how the JP Morgan Chase EAP and Work Life Program intervened to address the abovementioned issues.
Tags: behavioral health, behavioral issues, Dan Conti, depression, EAP, EAPA, Employee Assistance Program, JP Morgan Chase, JP Morgan Chase EAP and Work Life Program, mental impairment, work/life
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