Social issues

The health of the individuals we insure is very important to Helsana: we want them to stay healthy and enjoy a high quality of life. As a result, we go further than simply paying out illness- and accident-related costs. We use our campaigns to raise awareness and also specifically promote measures to stay healthy by supporting and rewarding health-conscious behaviour.

For a healthy life

Health consultation: this is evident from our health consultation service, as part of which we provided over 20,500 consultations in the reporting year. We provide free information and recommendations on individual health issues, such as preventive options and how to deal with diagnoses and nutrition, to support the individuals we insure with their health-related queries.

Helsana+ app: the use of digital technologies plays a central role in our offering. With our Helsana+ app, we reward the individuals we insure for health-conscious behaviour. Insured persons can collect over CHF 300 in Plus points every year and convert them into various benefits, such as cash, vouchers or donations to our social commitments (Swiss Red Cross and Theodora Foundation).

Helsana Coach app: the Helsana Coach app also helps our insured persons achieve their personal health goals with tips on exercise, nutrition and mindfulness. Services also include weekly fitness and cooking lessons as well as recipe ideas to promote a healthy lifestyle. The link between Helsana+ and the Helsana Coach app means that completed Coach sessions can also translate into rewards in the form of Helsana+ Plus points.

Helsana trails: there are more than 360 Helsana trails at over 120 locations in Switzerland (see chapter “Environment and resource consumption”), regularly maintained by local trail managers. These signposted circuits are accessible free of charge and encourage outdoor exercise.

Case management: we support our insured persons who have suffered an accident or fallen ill with our case management services, available in both the individual customer and the corporate business. The aim of this service is to provide targeted and coordinated support for those affected in their complex life situation and to give them comprehensive advice in order to help them make a return to working life as soon as possible.

Health management for corporate customers: our Helsana Business Health solutions help companies to promote occupational health management and improve the well-being of their employees. We also support companies in reducing long-term absences through comprehensive prevention services.

Ratgeber: as part of our commitment to the population’s health literacy, we have developed the “Ratgeber” series of publications. It covers relevant health topics such as “hormones” or “allergies” and offers background knowledge and helpful tips in consultation with experts in the field. We also offer free webinars, which are accessible to everyone, to increase the population’s knowledge of relevant topics.

“We are actively committed to making health promotion more accessible to our customers. That’s why we are constantly developing our services, such as the Helsana Coach app and health consultations, adapting them to suit our customers’ needs.”

Josianne Merz
Strategy and sustainability specialist

Healthcare quality and affordability

Healthcare studies: taking a holistic view of costs, quality and services allows the healthcare system to be developed sustainably, and in a way that makes sense, in the interests of society at large. Healthcare research creates transparency and provides key findings to influence the quality of care and the costs involved. This is why Helsana has been operating its own scientific centre for more than ten years now, researching the efficiency and quality of medical care. Findings from these healthcare studies are used as quality indicators in alternative insurance models and corresponding contracts with service providers: as far back as 2018, Helsana Services Contracting had already implemented selected remuneration-related quality indicators in all contracts with networks of doctors, which are used to measure aspects of the quality of care, particularly in primary medical care. Treatment in these integrated healthcare models is higher quality and more cost-effective in comparative terms. Working together with doctors, approaches are then discussed to further improve treatment methods. Among other activities, we conducted 14 scientific studies in the year under review in order to further optimise efficiency and quality.

Study on antibiotic prescribing practice: by way of example, a study conducted by Helsana in the reporting year together with the University Hospital Zurich and the Swiss Centre for Antibiotic Resistance sheds light on antibiotic prescribing practices in Switzerland. Around one third of antibiotic packages prescribed do not comply with medical recommendations, which often leads to too much medication being taken. One aspect that is particularly striking is that suitable package sizes are not available on the market for almost half of the common treatments (e.g. urinary tract infections, pneumonia). This resulted in an estimated 2.7 million tablets being prescribed unnecessarily in 2022 – a problem in times of medication shortages, rising healthcare costs and antibiotic resistance. In order to conserve resources, partial dispensing should be promoted and doctors and pharmacists should be made more aware of the need to stick to the guidelines. In addition, automated blister packaging of medication could be included in the LOA V pharmacy rate in order to enable more precise and resource-efficient dispensing of medication.

Digitalised document processing: digitalisation promotes sustainability. Helsana uses digital technologies to make its activities more secure, transparent and flexible, and to enable it to be more responsible in terms of handling customer funds and the environment at the same time (see chapter “Environment and resource consumption”). What is more, any hard-copy documents received are scanned so that they can be processed automatically later on down the line. We were able to increase the document automation rate to 90.5% this year. By continuously optimising and digitalising our processing steps in this way, we can cut administrative costs while increasing the processing quality at the same time. Automated processing also reduces the error rate in the processing of medical or hospital invoices, for example.

Systematic cost control: thanks to the large volume of data that Helsana has at its disposal, it can verify the invoices it receives from service providers systematically. Costs or individual treatments are compared with each other and excessively expensive services and treatments are identified and claimed back. By working with a specialised team, this allows Helsana to make a major contribution to reducing healthcare costs. Helsana attaches a great deal of importance to sustainable regulation in the provision of services that meet the criteria of “efficacy, expediency and cost-effectiveness”.

Our health policy commitment

Our aim is to actively promote the health of the people we insure and to develop effective health initiatives. We are committed to eliminating false incentives in the healthcare system. This is something we achieve through close cooperation with collective bargaining partners and authorities. By offering transparent prices and innovative solutions, we seek to improve the quality of care in the long term and ease the financial burden on our insured persons.

The introduction of the new outpatient medical tariff marks a key step towards increasing efficiency. The previous “Tarmed” tariff system is to be replaced. The new medical tariff adjusts the remuneration of medical services to ensure it is appropriate, and takes account of developments in medical care. This avoids false incentives and ensures quality.

In the reporting year, the electorate also marked an important milestone in the further development of the healthcare system by approving the bill on uniform financing for outpatient and inpatient benefits. This reform allows savings to be made while maintaining the same level of quality, relieving the burden on premium payers. Constructive cooperation between all stakeholders is required to implement this reform. Helsana is actively involved in driving these changes forward.

One central concern relates to establishing greater transparency in the pricing of medications and medical products. The aim is to avoid excessive profit margins and unnecessary burdens on premium payers. We also endeavour to maintain the high quality of medical care.

Over the next few years, it will be crucial to set the course for a sustainably financed and high-quality healthcare system. Helsana will continue to work actively with authorities and partner organisations to ensure the success of reforms such as uniform financing and the introduction of the new medical tariff.

Innovation and partnerships

Helsana promotes the quality and financial viability of the healthcare system through innovation and partnerships. By investing in digital solutions and start-ups, the company is doing its bit to ensure sustainable healthcare development, focusing on customer benefits, efficiency and transparency.

Compassana: in 2022, Helsana founded the Compassana healthcare network together with Medbase, Hirslanden and the health insurers Groupe Mutuel and SWICA. The digital portal provides patients with greater transparency, enhances their personal responsibility and allows them to benefit from better networking between specialists, the aim being to reduce the number of scenarios in which patients undergo the same examinations twice for no reason, and to improve the quality of treatment.

The Compassana customer app was integrated into the new alternative insurance model (AIM) product BeneFit PLUS Flexmed in the reporting year. This new product for Helsana’s alternative insurance models offers premium-related advantages, assured access to GPs and telemedicine, as well as digital healthcare solutions. An AI-supported symptom checker comes into play before patients seek treatment. Compassana is planning to enhance the symptom checker in order to optimise triage and make access to the appropriate service providers even more efficient. This has the potential to improve healthcare for patients and boost efficiency in the provision of services. The network of participating service providers is being continuously expanded.

myHelsana: the features offered by our myHelsana client portal are being expanded further. Our customers have been able to add their insurance card to their electronic wallet since the beginning of our reporting year. This new feature means that they always have their insurance card ready to hand in their wallet. It can be accessed when they visit their doctor or pharmacist with just a few clicks on a mobile phone or smartwatch. myHelsana users can also log in to Compassana with a single sign-on and now enjoy access to information on the medication they have received that has been billed to Helsana. They can also access health data stored in Compassana, such as laboratory values or doctor’s prescriptions. By the end of 2024, more than one million individuals insured with Helsana had registered for myHelsana.

Our supplementary outpatient insurance product PRIMEO enables innovative testing, such as multi-gene panel tests for pharmacogenetics, which can be used for preventive purposes. These currently include tests such as Sonogen XP, which analyses metabolic processes to test how certain medication is broken down and tolerated.

Helsana Health Invest: our subsidiary Helsana Health Invest (HIAG) has been investing in start-ups and venture funds, primarily in the digital health sector, in Switzerland and across Europe since 2021. HIAG invests in solutions that improve the quality and efficiency of patient care. This is part of a conscious effort to separate the role of investor – i.e. the shaper of the healthcare system – from the role of health insurer. We are addressing the polarity between our operational role today and our ambition to shape the healthcare system of tomorrow. HIAG has invested, for example, in “Entyre”, which addresses key domestic care challenges. In the reporting year, HIAG invested in “Yazen”, a digital clinic that helps overweight patients achieve and maintain their normal weight. The aim is to counteract the follow-up costs caused by obesity in Switzerland.

Digitalisation and data-driven healthcare solutions offer considerable potential for making processes more efficient and reducing costs for insured persons in the long term. We aim to further expand preventive measures using targeted healthcare programmes in order to improve the quality of care.

As an insurer and service provider, our employees take centre stage for us. Helsana actively promotes the development, health and well-being of its employees. We are systematically committed to diversity, equal opportunities and a positive corporate culture.

Employee development

The changes in the world of work due to new technologies, demographic shift and the shortage of skilled labour require ongoing investment in employee skills. Helsana wants to live up to this responsibility and attaches a great deal of importance to personal and professional development. The aim is to strengthen employability, address the skills that the company needs in good time, and actively rise to social challenges.

In the reporting year, Helsana implemented numerous measures to specifically promote employee development. Culture Day, which is part of the onboarding process and offers new employees a structured overview of the development options open to them, was introduced for the first time. Participants actively examine their skills and how they could advance their careers. A special programme was introduced for new managers, covering topics such as leadership philosophy, HR development and healthy leadership.

Helsana also offers a vast range of further training programmes that can be accessed via an internal learning platform. In particular, employees can find courses on specialist and management topics, language courses and health promotion programmes here. The mentoring programme introduced at head office in 2023 was successfully implemented for the first time in our regions and for employees with direct customer contact in the reporting year. It focused on topics such as leadership skills, networking and project management. Our knowledge platform “Globo” was also expanded to include an AI-supported bot, making access to relevant knowledge more efficient.

On average, employees invested 20 hours in further training in the reporting year and 92% took part in the annual “Incontro” employee appraisal, which looks at personal objectives, development measures and assessments.

Helsana plans to bring professional development even closer into line with its entrepreneurial needs and the skills required in the future. The focus in the new year will be on the leadership skills of “taking responsibility”, “collaboration” and “change”. The challenge lies in adapting the options available to reflect the rapid pace of technological change and to promote employees’ willingness to learn.

Employee health and well-being

For years now, Helsana has been committed to comprehensive occupational health management (OHM) that creates optimal conditions for employees’ physical and mental health and performance. The aim is to use preventive measures and targeted support programmes to promote and safeguard long-term health.

In the reporting year, Helsana once again received the “Friendly Workspace” award from Health Promotion Switzerland. The commitment to mental health, including the early detection of mental illness, was emphasised as a particular attribute. New managers attend mandatory courses on healthy and inclusive management. Annual awareness-raising campaigns and support services such as health coaching, psychological counselling via the Aepsy app provided by our external partner, and mental health first aid courses round off these measures.

In 2024, the focus was on promoting resilience. Helsana’s occupational health management team helped employees strengthen their inner resilience with keynote speeches, seminars and short sessions to promote mindfulness, gratitude and personal strengths.

Absences due to illness in 2024 were up slightly compared to 2023: they totalled 8.8 days per full-time equivalent (FTE) compared to 8.3 days in the previous year. The increase is due in part to the severe flu epidemic at the beginning of the year and the renewed rise in influenza cases in the autumn.

In 2025, Helsana will be offering up to five free, confidential support sessions with psychologists and psychotherapists via its external partner Aepsy. This rapid access will allow Helsana to support employees with mental health challenges early on. There are also plans for an awareness-raising campaign to prevent bullying and sexual harassment. These measures are aimed at further strengthening preventive healthcare and raising employee awareness of what a healthy work environment is.

Diversity and equal opportunities

Helsana is actively committed to equality between women and men and for people with disabilities. The aim is to eliminate gender-specific pay gaps, increase the proportion of women in management positions and make the world of work accessible to everyone. Equal pay and career opportunities are essential to prevent discrimination of any kind and to retain qualified employees in the long term.

As in the previous year, particular emphasis was placed on reducing gender-specific pay gaps in the reporting year: We professionalised the calculation methodology and have been using the current industry-standard calculation methodology since 2024. As such, the reporting figure cannot be compared directly with the previous year’s figure. In conjunction with targeted measures, Helsana achieved a pay gap of ≤1.0% in 2024.

The focus was on basic salaries, excluding roles with commission-based remuneration systems in order to ensure comparability. Commission-based roles have a lower but identical basic salary, ruling out any inexplicable gender-specific pay gap in terms of basic salary, but hindering comparability with the rest of the population. Our good results in the area of equal pay were confirmed by the highest possible “Fair-ON-Pay Advanced” certification awarded to us by Comp-On.

We are proud to have already achieved certification in the reporting year and are working towards reducing inexplicable pay gaps between men and women in the long term. Structured processes, monitoring, transparent processes for setting salary levels and targeted salary adjustments will contribute to this quest.

The gender split in management positions was analysed in depth in the reporting year. When filling management positions, particular attention is paid to a balanced candidate split. A survey of over 400 women and 100 managers also showed that cultural barriers, such as the belief that part-time management positions are not possible, persist and need to be broken down further. To raise awareness, the majority of managers completed the e-learning course on “Unconscious bias” and obtained more in-depth knowledge in webinars.

In addition to the activities described above, we received the UND certificate for the third time in the reporting year in recognition of our efforts to ensure work-life balance. The Fachstelle UND organisation awards the “UND – ERWERBSARBEIT UND PRIVATLEBEN VEREINBAREN” (Family AND Career) label to companies that successfully implement measures that help employees balance work, family and private life and ensure equality between men and women.

The proportion of women in middle management was increased year-on-year and we have already achieved our target. The proportion of women in top management, as well as on the Executive Board and the Board of Directors, remained unchanged. There were no staff changes on the Board of Directors or the Executive Board in the reporting period. The ongoing challenge is to ensure that awareness-raising measures have an impact in the long term (see chapter “Focus on the essentials”).

In 2025, Helsana will become a member of “Advance – Gender Equality in Business”, the leading business association for gender equality in Switzerland. By signing the Diversity Charter, Helsana is stepping up its commitment to equality and will be able to offer a corresponding programme for ambitious women in the future.

Over and above these activities, we also forged ahead with our work on the topic of “Working with a disability”. Incorporating accessibility into our work processes is a top priority for us. Relevant areas such as marketing and IT underwent training on this topic. We have updated our instructions and defined appropriate software for our e-learning sessions to make them accessible.

Our quest remains to create a working environment that offers equal opportunities to all employees and promotes diversity.

Working conditions and corporate culture

We are committed to an attractive corporate culture, a working environment that promotes good health and a transparent remuneration system in order to boost satisfaction levels and long-term loyalty among our employees. We attach a great deal of importance to clear, transparent communication and regular feedback.

We continued to take targeted measures to refine our employer brand in the year under review. We increased our visibility by posting actively on social media, particularly via our corporate culture page. The salary transparency we established within the company was also disclosed externally by including salary bands in job ads. We also actively ask applicants for feedback in order to continuously improve our processes. This resulted in our endeavours being recognised again in the form of the award for “Best Recruiter” in the industry (2023/2024) and a ranking among the Top 5 for Switzerland as a whole.

The further development of our organisation and the efficiency gains we achieved allowed for more targeted HR planning, which explains the moderate decline in new hires to 282 employees. Satisfaction among our employees remains a key concern for us – the staff turnover rate of 380 people was down slightly year on year. The results of our employee survey show clear progress: commitment rose from 70 to 76 points and satisfaction with the work situation was up from 72 to 78 points, with an impressive participation rate of 90%. These positive developments can be traced back to numerous measures such as new webinars, the organisation of employee forums that allow employees to engage in direct dialogue with the Executive Board, and our cultural journey “Committed to Helsana”, which focused on feedback, collaboration and leadership in 2024. This journey allows us to work towards our vision of making Helsana one of the best companies for leadership, culture and collaboration. Together we are shaping a culture founded on trust, innovation and a strong community.

We will also be increasing the transparency of our employer benefits, expanding target group-specific interactions with young talent and specialists, and continuously optimising our recruitment process. Investments will be made in human capital management and in performance and development processes to strengthen the culture of responsibility in the long term.

Our social commitment is centred on health issues, true to our promise “Committed to life”. We promote initiative, partnerships and sustainable projects to help others and play an active role.

As an official partner of the Swiss Red Cross (SRC), we support two key issues: “first aid” and “mental health first aid”. We encouraged people to take part in first aid courses and strengthened the network of first aiders in Switzerland. Numerous employees attended courses and supported the SRC with the “2x Christmas” campaign and on blood donation day.

The Theodora Foundation’s specially trained Giggle Doctors visit children in hospitals or special institutions. Their “medicine” offers relief and helps with the children’s healing: as a proud partner of the Theodora Foundation, we support this valuable work by helping to provide more than 115,000 children and their parents with carefree moments in difficult situations every year. During the “Week of Happiness”, our employees provided active support on site in the foundation’s photo bus. For every interaction with the video statements posted by the foundation, we were able to make a donation that could be used to fund numerous visits. Customers were also able to donate points collected via the Helsana+ app, raising CHF 64,000 for the Swiss Red Cross and the Theodora Foundation in the reporting year.

As part of our corporate volunteering programme, a total of 290 employees were involved in 27 one-day assignments with our partners SRC and the Theodora Foundation in 2024, along with other organisations such as Pro Natura, helping to maintain hiking trails, performing clean-up work at Lake Thun, and collaborating with “Tischlein deck dich – Lebensmittelhilfe Winterthur” and the Züriwerk Foundation. Helsana supports up to eight hours of volunteer work per person per year.

Every time we get involved in corporate volunteering, we not only support valuable projects but also receive true gifts ourselves. We learn new things, get to know environments we were not familiar with beforehand, and also see a different side to our colleagues from work. In short, it is a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Promoting health and social commitment remains a top priority for us, as does the active involvement of customers in our initiatives.