Hypertension is the clearest case in Indian workforce health of a problem that is expensive to ignore and inexpensive to find. It produces no symptoms, so it is never self-reported — and it is the single largest contributor to cardiac events in working-age adults.
Analysis of NFHS-5 data found that among adults of reproductive age with hypertension, 27.9% were aware, 14.5% were on treatment and 12.6% had it controlled. The steepest drop in that cascade is the first one.
Translated to an employer: of the roughly 355 people in a 1,000-person workforce who would meet the criteria, some 250 would not know. They are not refusing treatment. They have never been told.
Most corporate health check-ups do measure blood pressure. Three things then go wrong. A single reading taken in a queue, without five minutes of rest, is a poor measurement and frequently reads high or low. The result goes into a PDF the employee never opens. And nobody owns the follow-up, so a borderline reading produces no action.
The measurement is not the intervention. Somebody noticing the measurement, and telling the person what to do about it, is the intervention.
Cardiac events in working-age employees are catastrophically expensive — through claims, through the sudden loss of experienced people, and through the effect on everyone who worked with them. Hypertension is the largest modifiable contributor, and identifying it costs the price of a cuff and someone to follow up.
This is the cheapest high-value screen in workforce health. It is worth doing even if you do nothing else.
Every figure on this page comes from one of the following, checked against the published source before use.
The ROI calculator models this against your own headcount, age profile and premium. A Health Risk Assessment replaces the modelling with what is actually present in your workforce.