“The results suggest that enhanced depression care of workers has benefits not only on clinical outcomes but also on workplace outcomes,” the investigators wrote in the Sept. 26 issue of Journal of the American Medical Association.
The findings indicate that the added costs to employers of mental health benefits may have an even bigger payoff in terms of worker health and productivity, commented Kenneth B. Wells, M.D., M.P.H., and Jeanne Miranda, Ph.D., of the University of California at Los Angeles, in an accompanying editorial.
“The monetary value of the increased work time under the program exceeded the direct intervention costs and likely exceeded or was within the range of cost increases due to greater mental health specialty use under the intervention,” they wrote.