The Road to Wellville

Screen

After announcing the wellness initiative, Andersen offered screenings at some of its larger work sites for checking weight, blood pressure, total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, and blood glucose. Employees plug those numbers into StayWell’s print or secure online health assessment, which delves into their health history, lifestyle, exercise, and nutrition habits. The assessment gives the employee an overall score and highlights areas in need of change. “[A] home page is then customized [for each employee] based on how they answered the questions,” says Wieker. “They get a daily news feed based on what was important to them.”

StayWell will also assess the results of the questionnaire on an aggregate level—by law, companies cannot see individual employee-health results—to determine which health problems Andersen should address first. This year, the company will roll out more StayWell programs, such as individual coaching sessions, online resources, and on-site classes to target those problems.

Health-risk assessments, increasingly offered by health plans and other third-party vendors, are a hot new tool for companies, says Donna Fink, manager of vendor relations for Allina Hospitals and Clinics of Minneapolis. (Allina plans to implement a health-risk appraisal for its own employees in the first quarter of 2006.) “They help employees understand what are some unhealthy behaviors they can start to change, and they give aggregate data to the employer so they can make decisions about what’s best for their population overall,” Fink adds.

Health-risk assessments save companies money by helping them better focus programs, Gagne says. “In the past, companies used to throw the kitchen sink at employees to see what they’d pick up,” Gagne says. “Now it’s, ‘Let’s let the data drive how we’re going to design our programs. If we find that 80 percent of our population has high blood pressure, let’s focus our dollars on blood pressure.’”

Intervene, and Repeat

Once you’ve assessed the health risks in a company, what do you do to address them? Typically, a company offers a mix of on-site group programs, Web resources, mailings, and phone-based coaching sessions. For example, StayWell’s on-site offerings include a six-week program called Step It Up! that gives employees pedometers to measure their progress in an exercise program. Likewise, a 6- or 12-week Stress Quest program teaches them stress-management techniques. StayWell offers these kinds of programs as stand-alone options for companies, but more often tailors them in length and content to fit a company’s specific needs.

The more risk factors an employee has—say, obesity, smoking, and high blood pressure—the more likely he or she will also receive personalized coaching by phone. (The employee must indicate a desire to make that kind of change. There is no forced participation.) Anderson says his company’s typical coaching program includes five or more health coaching calls to the employee1s home over 8 to 10 months.

In a key departure from the past, the new data-analysis tools that let employers see danger areas among employees also allow them to reach out to individuals—instead of merely offering programs passively— without breaching confidentiality. Based on Andersen Windows’ assessment results, StayWell will contact higher-risk employees to invite them to participate in programs. “An invitation will pop up on line, and they can enroll,” Wieker says. “Or they will get a phone call or invitation in the mail.”

Targeted intervention to try to change behaviors is the key to boosting health and productivity and driving down costs, Anderson says. “All of us tend to keep doing what we did today unless we have a reason to change, so we try to be that catalyst for them,” he says.