Employers can reap a big payoff in productivity by spending more on conditions that are particularly responsive to treatment. Pfizer Inc. Many of the findings came from a series of studies in which Berndt, Senior Research Scientist Stan N. Finkelstein, MD , and Paul Greenberg SM '88 of Analysis Group Economics investigated specific occupations and illnesses. Take chronic depression. The effects of depression on work have grown as greater numbers of women, who are more at risk than men, have become employed outside the home.
Depression causes a precipitous decline in job performance at the onset of an episode.
The drugs raise an employer's direct costs, but can earn back their price many times over by preventing losses in productivity. In other cases, the problem is not the lack of treatment but the wrong treatment. Employers have often taken a penny-wise approach to covered drug prescriptions and services. Antihistamines that cause drowsiness, for example, are cheaper than the nonsedating variety, but as any cold or allergy sufferer will testify, they slow effective performance to a halt. The lesson, obviously, is that inexpensive does not always mean cost effective.