The Hidden Cost Driver: How Behavioral Health Impacts Your Top Clinical Categories

Even if behavioral health isn’t among your top five highest-spend clinical categories, it’s a critical area for strategic investment. Conditions like depression and anxiety may be silently exacerbating—or even driving—costs in major categories such as cancer, musculoskeletal, circulatory, digestive, and maternity/newborn. An integrated approach that aligns your employee assistance program (EAP) with medical and pharmacy benefits can uncover these connections and enable more effective interventions. Building an integrated behavioral health care plan supported by unified analytics helps track not just total cost of care, but also category-specific spend, including in rheumatologic conditions. Recent research reinforces the need for a whole-person approach: PTSD has been linked to a 2–3x increased risk of developing systemic lupus erythematosus, highlighting the biological consequences of chronic psychological stress (Parperis et al., 2025). Additionally, social isolation has been shown to significantly increase mortality risk in patients with osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis, underscoring the importance of addressing mental and social health as part of chronic disease management (Ma et al., 2025).

Parperis, K., Papachristodoulou, M., Derk, C., Psarelis, S., Voskarides, K., & Chatzittofis, A. (2025). Post-traumatic stress disorder and systemic lupus erythematosus: Insights from a systematic review. Rheumatology. https://doi.org/10.1093/rheumatology/keaf220

Ma, C., He, S., Luo, J., et al. (2025). Social isolation and risk of mortality in middle-aged and older adults with arthritis: A prospective cohort study of four cohorts. Scientific Reports, 15, 8073. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-93030-4