Neil Goldfarb Previews the 2024 GPBCH Annual Wellness Summit

Neil Goldfarb, president and chief executive officer of the Greater Philadelphia Business Coalition on Health (GPBCH), shared insight into the themes and sessions at the upcoming GPBCH Annual Wellness Summit taking place September 10, 2024.

Transcript

Can you speak to the range of themes that will be covered at this year's Annual Wellness Summit?

This is our 12th annual Wellness Summit for the Greater Philadelphia Business Coalition on Health. Sometimes in the past, we have had themes for the meeting. This year, we don't really have a theme—or, if I had to give a label to it, I would say the theme is, "What do employers need to know more about that either they may be working on right now and could use some help with, or that they're not really thinking about yet, but has the impact of improving health for the workforce and/or saving some money." So we've got a wide range of topics for this year's program.

What are some highlights on the agenda this year, and why are they important for employers?

We have a packed agenda this year of, I think, really good speakers on important topics. So I'm going to highlight a few of those, knowing that there's even more. If you come and join us on September 10.

One of the things our members have asked about is, what are employers doing about financial wellbeing? So we have a whole panel discussion about what employers can do to identify people who need some help with financial wellbeing, and what they can do short of just increasing salaries.

We also know that employers are very concerned about antiobesity medicine coverage, particularly GLP-1s [glucagon-like peptide-1 agonists], and recognize that obesity is a major driver of ill health and cost, but that GLP-1s come with a pretty hefty price tag. So we're going to have a discussion led off by an actuary from Milliman talking about, well, what do we know the case is for GLP-1 coverage? Should employers cover them? How should they cover them? And then we'll also hear from a benefits consultant and an employer talking about what they're doing to cover GLP-1s without letting the horse out of the stable, so to speak, and make sure that use is appropriate and they're getting the most bang for the buck.

We have a session on diabetes management. We know obesity and diabetes are on the top of all employers' minds, and many employers are just starting to think about how they can improve their diabetes management efforts, particularly around continuous glucose monitoring. It comes with a pretty hefty price tag. Should I be covering it? Under what circumstances should I be covering it? So we have a case study from the Metro Nashville school district where they incorporated continuous glucose monitoring into their diabetes management program, and we'll hear about the outcomes they achieved by doing that.

We have a session on migraine. We know many employers don't yet have a formal approach to managing migraine, but it's a significantly prevalent condition, particularly in the female workforce. So we want to talk about what's the latest on migraine prevalence and cost? What can employers do to encourage the population with migraine to self-manage and to reduce overall impact of migraine on productivity and on cost?

And then the last topic I want to spotlight is one I'm really excited about: the food as medicine movement. There's growing attention to the fact that with proper nutrition, we can be avoiding a lot of the chronic disease issues, including obesity and diabetes that I just mentioned. So, how can employers both recognize the importance of nutrition and what can they do to promote healthy eating in their workforce? So we have the head of Manna, a large service organization that focuses on food insecurity and nutrition, talking about what we know from the science of food is medicine and what employers ought to be thinking about to promote healthy eating.

I'm really excited about those topics. We also have sessions on preparing for flu and COVID, providing social support and caregiving for the people in need, and cardiovascular disease equity and the particular impact of cardiovascular disease on women, who tend to get less attention to prevention and get treated at later stages of illness. So overall, we're all over the board, but I think all those topics should be of interest to employers and people who work with employers.

Beyond the sessions and speakers, what networking opportunities does the Wellness Summit provide?

One of the things I really love to do with the Wellness Summit is we provide several community tables for groups like the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association, and the American Cancer Society to exhibit materials at no cost, things that would be useful to employers. So we'll have our usual community tables.

We also have a lot of exhibitors at the conference—vendors, consultants, and others who have resources, information to offer to employers, and we provide around an hour and a half throughout the day for attendees to network with each other and to network with these exhibitors and learn more about resources that are available to them that they can take advantage of, at in many cases, little or no cost. So we're really excited by providing these kinds of opportunities for coalition members and guests.

The program is open not just to members, so we hope to see a great turnout for our program and have people make new friends, learn new things, and take things back to the workforce to improve the health and wellbeing of their workforce and the broader community in which they work and live.