The Oxygen Plan

The Oxygen Plan specializes in decoding stress and helping employers lower health care costs, improve productivity and strengthen employee engagement. The Oxygen Plan, co-developed by Dr. Donald E. Williams, board-certified clinical health psychologist (American Board of Professional Psychology/ABPP), and Chief Science Officer and Founder, Eric Lucas, is the only stress reduction program to use a patent-pending green, yellow, red color coding to easily facilitate stress recognition and behavior change for individuals and organizations. The Oxygen Plan is also the home of the Stress Number™, the new health metric, and first to quantify stress levels.


Employee stress drains $400 billion a year from U.S. employers–yet many organizations do not fully understand the damage stress causes to their profit margins, employee productivity levels and employee health.


Stress is a concern in the lives of people – at work, in the social lives and especially at home.

Employers should be increasingly alarmed given that stress levels remain unchecked. A company of 10,000 has lost up to $50 million for each of the past 3 years for a total of nearly $150 million. The costs are staggering and should grab the attention of any CEO or CFO, particularly since stress is the #1 modifiable health risk factor.

A “Stress Number™” can be used as an aggregated health risk assessment tool for assessing employee stress. The Oxygen Plan Corporation help employers understand how they can use the Stress Number™ to increase stress management program effectiveness and optimize their Employee Assistance Program.

The impact of stress in the U.S. workplace is bad news for employers as it manifests in lost productivity, absenteeism, presenteeism, group health expense, employee turnover and disability expenses. Many organizations invest in resources like EAPs, work-life programs and policies, and health and wellness programs. These are essential but reactive initiatives. Many organizations are unaware of their employees’ actual stress levels, how much of their stress is job-related, the root causes of their stress, or that they can be proactive in terms of addressing the very real problems and associated costs. Stress diminishes the engagement and effectiveness of a workforce, erodes workers’ physical and emotional health, and drives up medical costs.

With the Stress Number™, it is now possible to measure, compute, aggregate, report, and trend a stress metric as it relates to personal health or organizational cost. Now we are able to assess stress, calculate the Stress Number™, provide The Oxygen Plan program and re-measure stress for individuals or organizations. The Stress Number™ is a significant development in the field of health metrics. The Stress Number™ should be used to help individuals and organizations manage health and health care costs – just like blood pressure and BMI. Because stress in the home or social life impacts employees at work, and vice versa, it’s in employers’ best interest to know the aggregate employee Stress Number™ for their organization and get a line of sight into root causes.