Businesses and workplaces are the future for delivering healthcare services and will progressively be expected to do so, international experts have said.
However healthcare schemes should be focusing more on maintaining people in good health rather than those who become sick.
It was also acknowledged that the UK faced the same challenges as the USA, despite boasting a universal healthcare system.
Professor Dee Edington of the University of Michigan, who has conducted 30 years of research in the area, told the WPA Health and Productivity conference that the burden for people's health would increasingly fall on employers.
And he explained companies should be targeting the health of their workforce as an aim to maintain and increase productivity.
"If you want to make a difference you have to start with companies in the United States and I think that's going to be true in the rest of the world," he said.
"Right now if society is going to move forward companies are the only ones that benefit if people are healthy, everyone else benefits from sick people.
"Health is not a cost in companies - prevention in health and in healthy people is an investment. The same way you'd invest in your children you invest in your employees," he added.
Prof. Edington also explained that many healthcare systems around the world were missing the point of encouraging people to remain healthy and reduce subsequent costs, rather than targeting expensive treatments on the sick.
"In the UK you do nothing for low health risk people (those with few risk factors at present such as obesity or smoking)," he continued.
"Doctors ignore them and we ignore them.
"No one has tried to work with those people to maintain their good health," he added.
In response, Dame Carol Black agreed there were great similarities in the approach needed for the UK and USA.
"Although we have different processes and ways of running our health services I think our challenges are the same as the USA," she said.
"Despite these different processes and programs, what we're trying to do is the same and it was only in 2005 we developed a cross government agenda to address this in the UK.
"We want to engage workforces and we want them to be well managed organisations, because if you haven't got a well managed organisation, the fresh fruit and vegetables and gyms aren't really that important.
"We have a lot of things to do in the UK and there are a lot of different places to improve," she added.
