Beyond Wellness, HRAs and Biometrics – Emerging Strategies to Promote Corporate Health

Can You Improve Health Through Online Questionnaires?

Businesses utilizing Corporate Concierge Health benefit from happier, healthier employees at a favorable price point. In a previous post, we demonstrated the 2 reasons for which the Corporate Concierge Health model works so well. These reasons, in brief, are easy access to primary care doctors, as well as building a relationship with your doctor. In the current post, we attempt to look beyond wellness at emerging strategies to improve the health of your workforce. We find that for the most part –

“current initiatives are limited to performing annual Health Risk Assessments and biometrics.”

Financial incentives, then, are usually put in place to stimulate plan members to undergo or submit or undergo an annual health risk assessment. The hope is that deploying wellness or disease management programs informed by these data will improve the employees’ health.

What do We Do with These Data? How Can We Implement Better Employee Health Beyond Wellness?

First, let’s see who collects these data. It is usually wellness and disease management vendors. Next, data is analyzed, displayed in an easy to understand format and fed back to employers. Clearly, the identification of unhealthy behaviors, cost drivers and “gaps” in employees’ health is a step in the right direction. However, the million dollar question is what do you do with these data to change unhealthy behaviors.

“Currently, implementation means asking employees to fill out online wellness questionnaires or performing telephonic outreach.”

In spite of the identification of gaps in the workforce health, it appears that the implementation arm is insufficient to change unhealthy behaviors. We need methods beyond wellness to improve the health of our employees.

Beyond Telephonic Outreach and Web-based Questionnaires

Undoubtedly, we need to increase awareness in regards to the negative impact of smoking, obesity, uncontrolled diabetes or hypertension. The efficacy of the implementation arm, however, is actually changing behaviors and having an impact on healthcare dollars is highly disputed.

“The proven way to change unhealthy employee behaviors is Corporate Concierge Health.”

Corporate Concierge Health is fundamentally based on a close patient-doctor relationship. Therefore, the relationship of trust allows doctors with access to biometric, health risk assessment and wellness data – as is the case for Corporate Concierge Health – to successfully implement action plans. The success in demonstrating better employee health and lower corporate healthcare costs can be explained simply – it is because of this trust and longitudinal relationship building. Obtaining health risk assessment data and identifying gaps appears only as good as the ability to implement change. If this task falls on the shoulders of physicians that are outside of your organization and not integrated with the rest of your health endeavors, the results may be (and often times are) sub-optimal.

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