When Texas Instruments hired Dallas-based Professional Nutrition Therapists to consult with employees on nutritional health management in 1997, it did so under the rubric, “Saving $-Saving Lives.”
PNT, a national network of more than 500 licensed and registered dietitians, provides TI and other companies with ways to help employees reduce their risk of everything from the obvious (cardiovascular disease) to the less apparent (HIV and cancer).
PNT founder and CEO Donna Israel—a Dallas native and registered dietitian who received her Ph.D. in nutrition from Texas Woman’s University—was joined this year by national marketing director Angela Lemond. Lemond, also a registered dietitian, is a graduate of the UT Southwestern Allied Health Program.
Lemond emphasizes that good health is smart business. “We decrease companies’ health care costs by helping their workers get healthier through proper nutrition,” she says. “However you may feel about [Barack] Obama politically, what he said about his proposed health plan resonates in both human and financial terms: ‘We [will actually pay] for a dietitian for people to lose weight, as opposed to paying for the [diabetic’s] $30,000 foot amputation. That will save us money.’”
Marsha McCabe, former director of health promotion, benefits, and services at TI, says PNT’s services have paid off. Since 1997, McCabe says, “documented reports have reconfirmed TI’s initial expectation that dietitian intervention would significantly reduce health care costs for those TI insured who took advantage of this service.”
PNT, which was scheduled to start working locally with IBM in September, is believed to be the only company in North Texas offering such services. “In fact,” Israel says, “we are the only [registered dietitian]-owned company in the U.S. that does what we do nationally and internationally.”
