Five years since the Great Recession, the majority of organizations determine the value of employees’ jobs based on a market-pricing approach.

With employee news feeds brimming with headlines about recent computer hacks and data leaks, employers are showing a growing interest in offering identity theft protection services as a benefit to their worried workforce. Benefit industry experts say the relatively inexpensive voluntary benefit is not only highly-appreciated by employees, but it can also act as a differentiator in a benefit adviser’s sales portfolio.

With traditional voluntary benefits becoming almost a standard inclusion in the employee benefits package, non-traditional voluntary benefits are the new trend as the variety of offerings continue to evolve and rise in popularity.

About one-third of large employers are "very likely" or "likely" to add a new voluntary benefit or move a current benefit to voluntary in the next 18 months.

The nation’s actuaries used the State of the Union Tuesday to call on President Obama and Congress to address the needs of the nation's aging population in the last two years of his administration.

The latest Wells Fargo/Gallup Investor and Retirement Optimism Index study apparently drove home some unpleasant truths about how participants view their 401(k) plans and those who provide or administer them. 

If you needed any further evidence about the power of auto-enrollment, Vanguard has put out new research saying that the participation rate among those it studied came in at 91 percent when new employees are automatically enrolled. 

Mothers in Croatia are entitled to the highest number of paid parents leave days in the world, while fathers get the most paid time off with their newborns in Iceland.

Automation is a hot topic in defined-contribution plans, but while there has been a steady increase in the adoption of features such as automatic re-enrollment and other automatic plan features, they still haven’t reached ubiquity and might never get there.

With flu season well under way and the Ebola crisis unresolved, practices need a plan to make sure patients don't leave their offices with more illnesses than with which they arrived.

Hospitals have always been there for their communities — every hour of every day, year after year. When you are sick or injured, the big blue H signifies help and hope — a place to go to get the care you need. Today’s hospitals have been redefining what it means to provide care. They are working not just to mend bodies, but also to help people and communities become healthier by investing in basic social and personal needs.

St. Joseph’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, hosts a farmers market every Wednesday in its main lobby featuring produce gown on the hospital’s 25 acre farm. The land used for the farm was a hospital lawn until 2010 when a horse-drawn plow broke ground on the first four acres. The farm, now known as "The Farm at St. Joe’s," has since expanded to include three large "hoop houses," greenhouse-like structures that provide seasonal produce for the market – as well as patient meals, the hospital’s cafeteria and local food banks – all year long.

"Wellness" programs are currently undergoing a major evolution. As government policy continues to shift responsibility for health maintenance from employer to employee, wellness initiatives are turning out to be simply a piece of the bigger puzzle in health care’s key to overall wellness: health management.

Hospitals in Southeast Michigan are working to identify unmet or significant health needs in their immediate markets under new rules mandated by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. 

With hand hygiene a key factor in the fight against deadly hospital-acquired infections, the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare decided to tackle the issue by conducting its first patient safety project on the subject, the results of which are published in several articles in the Joint Commission's Journal on Quality and Patient Safety.

People who are overweight but exercise regularly will likely live longer and healthier lives than those who are at or under their "ideal" weight but never make it to the gym or lace up a pair of running shoes.

Working in health care, it turns out, may be hazardous to your health. Nurses who work rotating night shifts have an increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease (CVD) as well as lung cancer according to a study of nearly 75,000 female registered nurses set to be published in the March 2015 edition of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Regular exercise doesn't erase the higher risk of serious illness or premature death that comes from sitting too much each day, a new review reveals.