American Apparel Inc. and Nestle U.S.A. will be honored Monday by a state task force for the workplace wellness programs they offer employees.
Both the Los Angeles clothing manufacturer and the Glendale-based subsidiary of the Swiss food giant won Silver Fit Business Awards from the California Task Force on Youth and Workplace Wellness.
Leah Cox, executive director of the state group, created by the Legislature in 2002, said 78 businesses around the state applied for the designation, about the same as last year, with one-third of them applying for the first time.
“Considering the economic downturn and how scared everybody is, we’re pretty impressed that companies are still seeing advantages of investing in employee health,” Cox said.
American Apparel, which has about 3,500 employees in Los Angeles County, has become known for innovative wellness programs uniquely tailored to the needs of its mostly Hispanic workers who assemble the company’s trendy clothes. To reduce absenteeism, the company opened a full on-site health clinic for employees and their families. In addition, it employs eight massage therapists for use during breaks and makes all employees take an eight-minute afternoon stretching break to reduce repetitive stress injuries.
“Our employees are very enthusiastic about it,” said Catalina Yanez, who oversees the wellness program and also teaches an after-work aerobics class in a company conference room stocked with fitness equipment.
Nestle, which sells the health-oriented Jenny Craig, Power Bar and Lean Cuisine brands, requires every employee to take an online nutrition awareness course. For the first time this year it is offering all its employees, including its 2,000 countywide, a $100 incentive to complete a health risk assessment and participate in a follow-up program, such as working with lifestyle health counselors.
“We’re a nutrition company so it made sense to require our employees to be informed,” said K.D. Shaughnessy, the company’s director of benefits and health management.
Pay for Performance
Kaiser Permanente physicians and staff had to scale a steep learning curve to implement the managed care provider’s new electronic medical records system over the past few years.
Now, it appears that the $4 billion nationwide project has paid off in improved patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes, according to the state’s pay-for-performance program, which is intended to improve patient care.
All seven of Kaiser’s Los Angeles County medical practices were among the 10 in the county to be honored last week as top-performing by the Integrated Healthcare Association, which administers the pay-for-performance program, the nation’s largest. Also making the list were Cedars-Sinai Medical Group; UCLA Medical Group; and HealthCare Partners, largest physicians group in the county.
In addition to the honor, insurers like Anthem Blue Cross and Health Net of California will use the program to award incentive payments to doctors who improve clinical care and increase patient satisfaction. More than $212 million in payments to doctors in 230 physician groups around the state were made between 2003 and 2006.
Dr. Joel Hyatt, Kaiser’s regional assistant medical director, said this was the third year that all of Kaiser’s L.A. County groups made the list. But he noted all the practices this year benefitted from the move to the paperless medical records system. The system allows doctors, for example, to quickly print up a visit summary for patients to take with them.
Also patients can view test results at home as soon as they’re posted by the lab sometimes even before doctor have seen them.
“We’ve really seen that patients are happy to not have to take time off from work to go to the doctor if all they really need is a short consultation by e-mail,” said Hyatt, who uses the system with his own patients. “We’ve really seen it change the whole dynamic of doctor-patient interaction for patients.”
NovaDigm Vaccine Progresses
NovaDigm Therapeutics, a Torrance-based biotech spinoff of the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute, has signed a contract with Canadian biologics manufacturer QSV Biologics Ltd. to help it commercialize a vaccine for candidiasis, a fungul infection, and methicillin-resistant staphylococus aureus.
The latter bacteria are an increasing source of hospital infections that can’t be treated with traditional antibiotics like penicillin. If successful, NovaDigm’s vaccine would be the first to prevent infection by both fungi such as candidiasis and bacteria like staphylococus aureus. Edmonton-based QSV will be responsible for producing the vaccine for early clinical trials, among other tasks.
“We are very pleased to see this exciting discovery moving forward,” said Carole Wagner Vallianos, interim chief executive of L.A. BioMed.
In other L.A. BioMed news, longtime chief executive Ken Trevett left last month to take a similar position at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio.
Staff reporter Deborah Crowe can be reached [email protected] or at (323) 549-5225, ext. 232.
