Practice Management Keeping Workers Well and Your Practice Profitable Urgent message: Adding a corporate wellness component to a UCOM initiative fosters better relationships with clients and good care for their employees—as well as more business for the practice. Donna Lee Gardner, RN, MS, MBA orporate wellness is one of the five basic service lines an urgent care oc- cupational medicine (UCOM) clinic is ad- vised to offer in order to position itself as a truly comprehensive resource for employers and their employees. Other primary occupa- tional medicine product lines—health surveillance, injury/loss management, rehabilitation and on-site services—complement the corporate wellness prod- uct line. Health surveil- lance and injury/loss man- © Bruno Budrovic / Getty. agement were discussed previously in JUCM (April and June 2008, respec- tively; also available at www.jucm.com), and the re- maining two product lines will be addressed in forth- coming articles. C 34 Background The implementation of cor- porate wellness services in a UCOM practice improves overall access to healthcare for a large segment of the population. The focus is on the effective management of employers’ medical and indemnity costs through injury prevention, health promotion, and disease management initiatives. The prevalence of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, asth- ma, depression and other de- bilitating conditions, com- bined with the aging work- force, are among issues forc- ing U.S. employers to devel- op a more effective way to manage worker absence and productivity loss. Consequently, employers are turning to local medical providers for assistance. UCOM physicians and allied professionals have an JUCM T h e J o u r n a l o f U r g e n t C a r e M e d i c i n e | O c t o b e r 2 0 0 8 w w w. j u c m . c o m