Truven Health Analytics Partners with National Business Group on Health to Launch Enhanced EMPAQ® Health and Productivity Measurement Tool

Truven Health Analytics™ today announced a partnership with the National Business Group on Health to facilitate a newly improved Employer Measures of Productivity, Absence and Quality™ (EMPAQ®) program.

EMPAQ® is an employer-developed and driven program that provides standardized metrics to assist companies in evaluating their health and productivity programs, such as short-term disability; long-term disability, workers’ compensation; group health; family and medical leave; incidental and integrated absence; employee assistance programs; and health management programs. By utilizing these metrics, employers can objectively assess their programs’ effectiveness and benchmark against similar organizations.

Created initially in 2001 to help employers make empirical observations on the links between population health and bottom-line financial performance, EMPAQ® has been the industry standard performance measurement benchmark for more than a decade. Starting in 2012, the National Business Group on Health’s EMPAQ® Steering Committee launched an effort to streamline the program to focus on the most critical metrics that all employers should track to understand the value of their health, productivity and absence programs. The resulting improvements have been incorporated into the newly improved EMPAQ® program, which will be managed on behalf of the National Business Group on Health by Truven Health Analytics.

“There is a direct relationship between effective management of employee health, productivity, and absence and the profitability of a company,” said Barbara Graovac, Senior Vice President at Truven Health Analytics. “By providing a direct and accurate vehicle to understand the value of a program, employers will be able to ensure they are spending wisely when it comes to cultivating a high-performing workforce.”

In an effort to ease the burden for participating employers, EMPAQ® will use a streamlined survey-based submission process. A joint National Business Group on Health and Truven Health EMPAQ® Review Committee will aggregate and interpret the survey results using sophisticated tools and analytics. The results will be incorporated into an annual benchmark report, which will be released at the National Business Group on Health’s Annual Conference on Health and Productivity each year and made available to the public. In addition, confidential individual reports—tailored to each employer’s unique experience—will be shared with the respective submitting organizations.

“With the EMPAQ® program, employers will now have a set of benchmarks to show them how their key health, absence and productivity programs are performing and help to identify opportunities for improvement,” said Brian Marcotte, President and CEO of the National Business Group on Health. “By partnering with Truven Health Analytics we are able to ensure that the inputs powering EMPAQ® accurately and comprehensively represent the experience of employers nationwide.”

For more information on the EMPAQ® program, visit http://www.empaq.org/.

For more information on Truven Health Analytics’ employer solutions, visit http://truvenhealth.com/your-healthcare-focus/employer.

About Truven Health Analytics

At Truven Health Analytics we are dedicated to delivering the answers our clients need to improve healthcare quality and reduce costs. We are a healthcare analytics company with robust, widely-respected data assets and advanced analytic expertise that have served the global healthcare industry for more than 30 years. These combine with our unique perspective from across the entire healthcare industry to give hospitals, clinicians, employers, health plans, government agencies, life sciences researchers, and policymakers the confidence they need to make the right decisions, right now, every time. With our healthcare-specific expertise and tools for managing complex and disparate data, we understand how to implement and integrate tailored analytics that drive improvement.

Truven Health Analytics owns some of the most trusted brands in healthcare, such as Micromedex, ActionOI, 100 Top Hospitals, MarketScan, and Advantage Suite. Truven has its principal offices in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Chicago; and Denver. For more information, please visit http://truvenhealth.com.

About the National Business Group on HealthSM

The National Business Group on Health is the nation's only non-profit, membership organization of large employers devoted exclusively to finding innovative and forward-thinking solutions to their most important health care and related benefits issues and to being the voice for large employers on national health care issues. The Business Group, whose 392 members include 66 of the Fortune 100, identifies, develops and shares best practices in health benefits, disability, health and productivity, related paid time off and work/life balance issues. Business Group members provide health coverage for more than 55 million U.S. workers, retirees and their families. For more information, visit www.businessgrouphealth.org.