Modernizing Care for Obesity as a Chronic Disease: A How-To Guide for Employers

As a country, we face an urgent need to develop and implement public health and health-care strategies that recognize obesity as a chronic disease, address disparities in multifaceted care, focus on person-centered solutions, and eliminate bias and stigma. Employers are uniquely positioned to drive environmental changes in the approach to health and health-care and thus are an integral part of the solution for obesity.

This How-To Guide—written with input from key decision-makers from all sectors within small, medium, and large-sized employers throughout the United States—is intended as a call to action and a resource for employers to accelerate the shift toward comprehensive, person-centered approaches to obesity care.

The guide identifies a core set of four opportunities for action centered around (1) education, (2) culture change, (3) benefit design, and (4) public policy as forces for meaningful change.