Calculate Return on Investment (ROI)

A big part of assessing your program is calculating the return on investment (ROI) that your obesity prevention and control program produces. This step may not be for every organization, and other outcome metrics may be enough to meet your needs. This section provides a tool to help determine your ROI.

CDC's Obesity Cost Calculator is an easy-to-use tool that can help you figure out an estimate of the obesity related costs to your organization, and compare the costs and benefits of certain obesity prevention and control interventions. It will allow you to estimate the following cost specific to your organization:

• Total costs attributable to high BMI
• Total annual medical costs attributable to high BMI
• Total annual work loss costs attributable to high BMI
• Number of employees with high BMI
• Average attributable cost per high BMI employee
• Expected costs of interventions to reduce obesity
• Potential reductions in medical costs and work loss resulting from interventions
• The number of years before a break-even period is reached¹⁴

The cost calculator is designed to allow employers to calculate the medical costs of obesity to their organizations, as well as the cost of increased absenteeism due to obesity.

There are many different factors to be considered when calculating ROI. Before using the cost calculator you may want to have the following information to get the best ROI estimate-

• Number of obese employees
• Total number of employees
• Hourly wages and benefits of employees
• Percent of employees receiving benefits
• Medical Co-payment
• Average workdays missed
• Number of employees within each BMI category
• Below 18.5
• 18.5 - 24.9
• 25.0 - 29.9
• 30.0 - 34.9
• 35.0 - 39.9
• 40.0 and above

Additional Resources

Use the Obesity Cost Calculator Worksheet (DOC-492k) to gather information to input into the cost calculator.

Use the Obesity Cost Calculator to figure out how much obesity costs your company and how much you could save by implementing an obesity prevention program in your workplace.

Also in This Section

• Conduct a Program Evaluation
• Expert Interview

---

 Microsoft Word

Description: Microsoft Word is a word processing program used to create and edit text documents. Text in Word documents can be easily modified or copied for use in other applications.
File extensions: .doc, .rtf
Viewing: If you do not already have Word, you can download Word Viewer for free*.