Enabling Healthy Decisions

Several Great Presentations To Share

March 19, 2014 by George Van Antwerp 0 Comments

I try not to do a lot of promotion of things within the company. (This is not a corporate blog.) But, I’m always happy to share cool things that are in the public domain that catch my eye.

Our sister company – GSW Worldwide – has been putting out a lot of new things on a blog, through their innovation lab, and through their SlideShare channel. I thought I would highlight a few of those here. Leigh Householder, Chief Innovation Officer, along with Ritesh Patel, Global Head of Digital, are driving a lot of this along with others on their teams.

Healthcare

health, HIT, mHealth, mobile, Pharma, Research, Trends

The #QuantifiedSelf and “Walking Interview”

June 6, 2013 by George Van Antwerp 0 Comments

If you haven’t heard, “sitting is the new smoking” in terms of health status. And, unfortunately, you can’t just get up and exercise for an hour and then go sit all day. That brief spurt of exercise doesn’t change the fact that we sit for 9+ hours a day.

If you think about our shift in work from a very manual work environment to a service and technology work environment, we’ve made activity during the day harder and harder to achieve. Between e-mail and meetings, most of us are stagnant to accomplish our work.

That got me thinking about the #QuantifiedSelf movement and all of the activity trackers (e.g., FitBit, BodyMedia). We know companies definitely look online to see people’s social media activity as part of the interview process. Will they begin to ask about their activity data as a proxy for health?

On the flipside, perhaps the person interviewing should really be asking to see their potential boss’ activity data. I’d be as interested in knowing what happens during the day. It would provide a lot of insight into what happens in terms of meetings, face-t0-face activity, and be a good proxy for the real work experience.

Of course, the other option would be to introduce “walking interviews”. People talk about walking meetings. I’ve even done a running meeting going for a jog with a potential partner to discuss how we work together. (It was the only time we could find to meet at a conference.)

Walking interviews would tell you a lot about someone’s health. You could go up some stairs. You could walk a few miles in an hour.

Since we know that health, happiness, and wealth are all correlated, this type of insight for the interviewer and interviewee seems very valuable.

Books / Articles, Business Tools, exercise, Healthcare, Infographic, Social Media

BodyMedia, FitBit, health, Infographic, QuantifiedSelf, Sitting Is New Smoking

How The CVS Program Will Change The Employer – Employee Contract

March 22, 2013 by George Van Antwerp 1 Comment

Have you heard that CVS Caremark is requiring employees to go get biometrics and going to take action on it? OMG!

I’m not sure I understand why people are all upset. Let’s look at the facts:

57% of companies do biometric screening today (AON study)
40% of companies use incentives and/or penalties today for biometrics (bSwift 2012 Wellness Survey)
People who are obese cost more (you can also go look at the CDC model they developed)
People who are obese are less productive which some estimate at a 1 month loss in productivity per year (NIH study and JOEM study)
80% of healthcare costs are controllable by 8 behaviors (AON study)
30% of people who are obese don’t realize it (article)

And, by the way, have we forgotten how much healthcare costs have gone up over time and who pays that bill. It’s either the employer or the government. Both of those things impact our pay as individuals either in terms of lower raises to cover healthcare costs, shifting healthcare costs to us, or taxes. It’s not sustainable so the person who pays the bill has to step in since we’re not. (Which is also why I support the NY ban on soda.)

Now, let’s look at our healthcare system where in the current fee-for-service model, there isn’t an incentive for physicians to address this.

1/3^rd of obese patients were never told they were overweight by their physician
Many doctors don’t know how to counsel the obese or have a major bias against them with limits their effectiveness

For now, people should be happy. They’re only being required to do the biometrics. The penalty isn’t linked to whether they’re fat or have high blood pressure or smoke or have high cholesterol or have diabetes. A recent study by Towers Watson shows that while 16% of employers do this type of outcome based incentive program today (2013) that this is going to jump to 47% in 2014. So, this will be the norm.

And, guess what…sticks often work better than carrots in some cases.

And, healthcare costs are making us uncompetitive globally as a country.

The cost of healthcare is greater than the cost of steel in a car.
The cost of healthcare is greater than the cost of coffee in a Starbuck’s cup of coffee.

And, health reform is allowing (even enabling) this to happen. It says that you can treat people differently and create up to a 50% differential in costs associated with their health. (Not a legal definition so read the fine print.)

But, what I think all of us (consumers and employers) will need to realize is that moving to this (which I agree with) will change the employer and employee relationship in several ways.

You can’t put these programs in place without something to help me manage my obesity, cholesterol, and/or other chronic condition. This will drive wellness and disease management programs to be more engaging and successful.
This will put pressure on employers to create a culture of health since we spend so much time at work and work contributes to our health conditions.
1. Need more time to be active. Less sitting. Treadmill desks. Standing meetings. Nap time. Walking breaks. Use of devices to track steps. Incentives. Gym discounts. Healthy food discounts.
2. Need less stress.
3. Need more sleep.
4. Better food choices at work.
This will drive a lot of the new tools and run counter to some trends about limiting dependent coverage since you can’t address obesity without engaging the entire family and the social network.
This will also create a whole exception process by which people who gain weight due to certain drugs have to be excluded. People who can’t exercise may have to be excluded. People may have to see short-term goals (i.e., dropping BMI from 35 to 32). Physicians will have to be engaged.
Coaching will have to expand to include dieticians, social workers, and others to help people beyond the historical nurse centric coaching model.

If none of this motivates you, then just think about the “gift” we’re giving our kids and maybe that will be a wake-up call why someone has to do something here. (As I shared the other day, I struggle with my weight so don’t think I’m some super skinny, high metabolism person who thinks this is easy.)