So many wellness industry misdeeds to expose, so little room on the internet.
This posting will start out as one of my typical shock-and-awe postings featuring a wellness vendor raising the bar for dishonesty and employee harms. Uniquely, though, we will close with a surprisingly uplifting slam-bang conclusion that could change the wellness industry forever…but only with your help.
The Bad News
It’s that time of year again, when traditionally the C. Everett Koop Award Committee bestows an award upon a fellow committee member or award sponsor, in recognition of doing the best job of fabricating dramatic savings while making only trivial improvements in employee health. That’s par for the course, and isn’t even news any more.
See also: The Yuuuuge Hidden Costs of Wellness
However, this year, the Koop Award Committee apparently decided that actually improving employee health was too high a bar for a wellness program to clear, so the committee gave the award to a committee colleague, Wellsteps, for a program in which the health status of Boise School District employees deteriorated. We’ve done the arithmetic so you don’t have to. The award application below shows that 5,293 employee biomarkers improved, while 6,397 got worse.
In addition to the objective failure of the program, consider employee self-reported health. The single most important question to ask to gauge the state of someone’s health is: “How is your health?” Wellsteps buried the answer to that question at the end of a long list, but squint hard enough and you can see that Boise employee self-reported health status declined, by a small but statistically significant (p=0.0007) amount:
There are many other problems with this program, too. Wellsteps is shaming even the lightest drinkers, attributing massive savings to improved health despite the deterioration in health, suppressing data showing increased health spending and flouting clinical guidelines. All that is covered in this Linkedin Pulse.
In all fairness, here is the response from Wellsteps’ Troy Adams (best known in the wellness industry for posting that ”It’s fun to get fat, and it’s fun to be lazy”) to my initial observations that Wellsteps is harming employees and fabricating savings. Surprisingly, I agree with both points:
In addition to the objective failure of the program, consider employee self-reported health. The single most important question to ask to gauge the state of someone’s health is: “How is your health?” Wellsteps buried the answer to that question at the end of a long list, but squint hard enough and you can see that Boise employee self-reported health status declined, by a small but statistically significant (p=0.0007) amount:
There are many other problems with this program, too. Wellsteps is shaming even the lightest drinkers, attributing massive savings to improved health despite the deterioration in health, suppressing data showing increased health spending and flouting clinical guidelines. All that is covered in this Linkedin Pulse.
In all fairness, here is the response from Wellsteps’ Troy Adams (best known in the wellness industry for posting that ”It’s fun to get fat, and it’s fun to be lazy”) to my initial observations that Wellsteps is harming employees and fabricating savings. Surprisingly, I agree with both points:
- Yes, the Wellsteps data is “rock solid;” and,
- Yes, having just walked into from 92-degree heat, I am at least temporarily full of “hot air.”
- Circulate this posting/the Code widely;
- As brokers or customers, insist that your vendor(s) follow the Code of Conduct…and add it as an actual contractual term;
- As brokers or vendors, announce that you will be following the Code. (While this blog is my own effort, I am also affiliated with Quizzify. Quizzify will be announcing this week that it intends to make this Code of Conduct a contractual term, meaning that failing to adhere to it would constitute a breach of our obligations under the contract.)
