How many times do wellness promoters have to admit or prove that wellness doesn’t work before everyone finally believes them?
Whether one measures clinical outcomes/effectiveness, savings or productivity, the figures provided by the most vocal wellness promoters and the most “successful” wellness programs yield the same answer: Wellness doesn’t work.
Vitality Group, which contributed to this McKesson award-winning result as a vendor, wants your company to publicly disclose how many fat employees you have. Why? So that you are “pressured” (their word) into hiring a wellness vendor like Vitality. Yet Vitality admits it can’t get its own employees to lose weight.
McKesson and Vitality continue a hallowed tradition among Koop Award-winning programs of employees not losing noticeable weight. For instance, at Pfizer, the 2010 award-winner, employees who opened their weight-loss email lost all of three ounces:
Maybe it’s unfair to pick programs based on winning awards. Awards or not, those programs could have cut corners. Perhaps to find an exception to the rule that wellness can’t improve outcomes, we should look to the most expensive program, Aetna’s. Unfortunately, even Aetna registered only the slightest improvement in health indicators, throwing away $500/employee in the process. Why that much? Aetna decided to collect employee DNA to predict diabetes, even though reputable scientists have never posited that DNA can predict diabetes.
So even award winners, wellness vendors themselves and gold-plated programs can’t move the outcomes needle in a meaningful way, if at all. Bottom line: It looks like we finally have both consensus on the futility of wellness, and data to support the wellness industry admission that way north of 90% of programs do indeed fail to generate outcomes.
Savings
Because wellness promoters now say most programs fail, it is no surprise they also say most programs lose money. Once again, this isn’t us talking. The industry’s own guidebook – written by Goetzel and O’Donnell and dozens of other industry leaders -- shows wellness loses money. We have posted that observation on ITL before, and no one objected.
However, very recently, the sponsors of this guidebook (the Health Enhancement Research Organization, or HERO) did finally take issue with our quoting statistics from their own guidebook. They pointed out -- quite accurately -- that their money-losing example was hypothetical. It did not involve numbers they would approve of, despite having published them. (At least, we think this is what HERO said. One of their board members has learned that they have sent a letter to members of the lay media, telling them not to publish our postings. We are told HERO’s objection centers on our quoting their report.)
To avoid a lawsuit for quoting figures they prefer us not to quote, we substituted their own real figures for their own hypothetical figures -- and using real figures from Goetzel’s company, Truven Health Analytics, multiplied the losses.
This very same downloadable guidebook notes that these losses, as great as they are, actually exclude at least nine other sources of administrative costs--like internal costs, impact on morale, lost work time for screenings, etc. (Page 10). Truven also excludes a large number of medical costs (Page. 22):
One could only assume that including all these administrative and medical losses in the calculation would increase the total loss.
Lest readers think that this consensus guidebook is an anomaly, HERO is joined in its conclusion that wellness loses money by AJHP. AJHP published a meta-analysis showing a negative ROI from high-quality studies.
Productivity
RAND’s Soeren Mattke said it best:
"The industry went in with promises of 3-to-1 and 6-to-1 ROIs based on healthcare savings alone. Then research came out that said that’s not true. They said, 'Fine, we are cost-neutral.' Now research says: 'Maybe not even cost-neutral.' So they say: 'It’s really about productivity, which we can’t really measure, but it’s an enormous return.'"
The AJHP stepped up to make Dr. Mattke appear prescient. After finding no ROI in high-quality studies, proponents decided to dispense with ROI altogether. “Who cares about ROI anyway?” were O’Donnell’s exact words.
Because health dollars couldn’t be saved, O’Donnell tried to estimate productivity impact. But honesty compelled him to admit that workers would need to devote about 4% of their time to working out to be 1% more productive on the job. Using his own time-and-motion figures, and adding in program costs, his math creates a loss exceeding $5,200/employee/year.
I would have to agree with O’Donnell, based on my experience in the 1990s as the CEO of a NASDAQ company. Ours was a call center company, which meant someone had to answer the phones. If I had let employees go to the gym instead of working, I would have had to pay other employees to cover for them. Our productivity would have taken a huge hit, even if the workouts bulked up employees’ biceps to the point where they could pick up the phone 1% faster.
Where Does This Leave Us?
Despite our using their own figures, wellness promoters may object to this analysis, saying they didn’t really intend for these conclusions to be reached. Intended or not, these are the conclusions from their figures, and theirs largely agree with ours, expressed in many previous blog posts on ITL. And, of course, our website, www.theysaidwhat.net, is devoted to exposing vendor lies. The bottom line is, no matter whose “side” you are on, the answer is the same. Assuming you look at promoters’ actual data or statements instead of listening to the spin, the conclusion is the same: Conventional wellness doesn’t work.
It’s time to move on.
- Outcomes/Effectiveness
Vitality Group, which contributed to this McKesson award-winning result as a vendor, wants your company to publicly disclose how many fat employees you have. Why? So that you are “pressured” (their word) into hiring a wellness vendor like Vitality. Yet Vitality admits it can’t get its own employees to lose weight.
McKesson and Vitality continue a hallowed tradition among Koop Award-winning programs of employees not losing noticeable weight. For instance, at Pfizer, the 2010 award-winner, employees who opened their weight-loss email lost all of three ounces:
Maybe it’s unfair to pick programs based on winning awards. Awards or not, those programs could have cut corners. Perhaps to find an exception to the rule that wellness can’t improve outcomes, we should look to the most expensive program, Aetna’s. Unfortunately, even Aetna registered only the slightest improvement in health indicators, throwing away $500/employee in the process. Why that much? Aetna decided to collect employee DNA to predict diabetes, even though reputable scientists have never posited that DNA can predict diabetes.
So even award winners, wellness vendors themselves and gold-plated programs can’t move the outcomes needle in a meaningful way, if at all. Bottom line: It looks like we finally have both consensus on the futility of wellness, and data to support the wellness industry admission that way north of 90% of programs do indeed fail to generate outcomes.
Savings
Because wellness promoters now say most programs fail, it is no surprise they also say most programs lose money. Once again, this isn’t us talking. The industry’s own guidebook – written by Goetzel and O’Donnell and dozens of other industry leaders -- shows wellness loses money. We have posted that observation on ITL before, and no one objected.
However, very recently, the sponsors of this guidebook (the Health Enhancement Research Organization, or HERO) did finally take issue with our quoting statistics from their own guidebook. They pointed out -- quite accurately -- that their money-losing example was hypothetical. It did not involve numbers they would approve of, despite having published them. (At least, we think this is what HERO said. One of their board members has learned that they have sent a letter to members of the lay media, telling them not to publish our postings. We are told HERO’s objection centers on our quoting their report.)
To avoid a lawsuit for quoting figures they prefer us not to quote, we substituted their own real figures for their own hypothetical figures -- and using real figures from Goetzel’s company, Truven Health Analytics, multiplied the losses.
This very same downloadable guidebook notes that these losses, as great as they are, actually exclude at least nine other sources of administrative costs--like internal costs, impact on morale, lost work time for screenings, etc. (Page 10). Truven also excludes a large number of medical costs (Page. 22):
One could only assume that including all these administrative and medical losses in the calculation would increase the total loss.
Lest readers think that this consensus guidebook is an anomaly, HERO is joined in its conclusion that wellness loses money by AJHP. AJHP published a meta-analysis showing a negative ROI from high-quality studies.
Productivity
RAND’s Soeren Mattke said it best:
"The industry went in with promises of 3-to-1 and 6-to-1 ROIs based on healthcare savings alone. Then research came out that said that’s not true. They said, 'Fine, we are cost-neutral.' Now research says: 'Maybe not even cost-neutral.' So they say: 'It’s really about productivity, which we can’t really measure, but it’s an enormous return.'"
The AJHP stepped up to make Dr. Mattke appear prescient. After finding no ROI in high-quality studies, proponents decided to dispense with ROI altogether. “Who cares about ROI anyway?” were O’Donnell’s exact words.
Because health dollars couldn’t be saved, O’Donnell tried to estimate productivity impact. But honesty compelled him to admit that workers would need to devote about 4% of their time to working out to be 1% more productive on the job. Using his own time-and-motion figures, and adding in program costs, his math creates a loss exceeding $5,200/employee/year.
I would have to agree with O’Donnell, based on my experience in the 1990s as the CEO of a NASDAQ company. Ours was a call center company, which meant someone had to answer the phones. If I had let employees go to the gym instead of working, I would have had to pay other employees to cover for them. Our productivity would have taken a huge hit, even if the workouts bulked up employees’ biceps to the point where they could pick up the phone 1% faster.
Where Does This Leave Us?
Despite our using their own figures, wellness promoters may object to this analysis, saying they didn’t really intend for these conclusions to be reached. Intended or not, these are the conclusions from their figures, and theirs largely agree with ours, expressed in many previous blog posts on ITL. And, of course, our website, www.theysaidwhat.net, is devoted to exposing vendor lies. The bottom line is, no matter whose “side” you are on, the answer is the same. Assuming you look at promoters’ actual data or statements instead of listening to the spin, the conclusion is the same: Conventional wellness doesn’t work.
It’s time to move on.
