More Personalized Experience Drives Even Deeper Employee Engagement, Behavior Change; More Actionable Insights Into Population Health Risks Help Employers Create Culture of Health

Traditional wellness efforts have failed to help organizations improve workforce health. Historically, they’ve been “one size fits all” – an approach that’s yielded low employee engagement and proven ineffective at driving real, sustainable employee behavior change.  And their insufficient data and reporting (if any) have offered few, actionable insights they can use to drive real workforce health improvements that help lower healthcare costs. At Virgin HealthMiles, we’ve turned the tides on this model, and today, we’re unveiling our Spring ‘12 product release.

Spring ‘12 helps organizations better motivate employees and drives higher employee engagement with a more personalized digital health experience based on better segmentation and more detailed data.  With Spring ‘12, employers get even more methods to collect detailed employee health data and enhanced real-time reporting so they can better measure and manage the impact of their employee health investments.

“Individuals are motivated by different things at different points in time.  What motivates one person may not motivate another. And what motivates someone today may not motivate them tomorrow. A ‘cookie-cutter’ approach won’t help employers create the culture of health or the lasting employee behavior changes they desire,” said Tom Abshire, senior vice president of products, marketing and member engagement for Virgin HealthMiles.

“But that’s been the approach most providers have offered employers. Here at Virgin HealthMiles, we do things differently. We take a consumer’s point of view and create a compelling, personalized experience that drives deeper engagement and leads to long-term healthy behavior change. With Spring ‘12, we’re equipping employers with more ways to target and tailor their programs for their workforce. And we’re offering new products and data collection methods that provide the data and insights employers need to optimize their employee health investments.”

With Spring ’12 release, employers can drive even better results and impact from their employee health investments.

Key Benefits of the Spring ’12 Release: Better Insight into Employee Population Health Driven by New Biometric Capabilities, Improved Health Assessment and Enhanced Real-Time Reporting

• Personalization, Detailed Data Drive Higher Motivation and Increased Employee Engagement:  Health and wellness programs won’t work if they don’t appeal to employees. Spring ‘12 leverages a more complete data set and enables employers to better target and tailor their programs to specific employee segments.  Employees can also utilize new tools to gain a better understanding of their health and develop a personalized set of health activities they find compelling. Developing their own plan increases employee motivation, engagement and behavior change.

• Expanded Suite of Methods to Collect and Measure Detailed Employee Health Data:  Spring ‘12 offers more methods to collect detailed health data and helps employers gain valuable insights to help guide decisions, strategy, and increase employee engagement.  Spring ‘12 includes expanded biometric screenings and health assessments, which provide employees with a better picture of their overall health and areas for improvement.  Armed with this data, employees can make more informed decisions and change lifestyle behaviors that lead to better health.

• Enhanced Real-Time Reporting Helps Organizations Target their Wellness Investments, Optimize Impact:  Spring ‘12’s enhanced real-time reporting helps employers better utilize data to identify, segment and market solutions that drive maximum employee engagement.  Improved real-time reporting helps organizations see which health areas are most important to address and then act on clear data to develop a strategy.  With real-time insights, organizations can focus or adjust programs to optimize their impact.  Enhanced reporting also enables employees to see all of their own, personalized data in one central place. This makes it easier for them to understand where to focus for improved health, set goals and track their progress over time, and personalize their experience and engage in activities that motivate them most.

Spring ’12 is now available to current and prospective Virgin HealthMiles clients.  Learn more at http://us.virginhealthmiles.com/resources/Pages/Spring12_WhatsNew.aspx.

Question: do you know the impact your health and wellness programs are having on your employees? Are they helping to improve their health? Are your employees more engaged? Are they even using the programs you offer?

You’re not alone if you’re unsure about these questions. A recent Buck Consultants survey found that only 37 percent of respondents measure the outcomes of their employee health programs, and that a high percentage of respondents don’t know the impact of their health promotion efforts.  I imagine these employers probably want to know, they just don’t have an easy and accurate way to point to quantifiable outcomes. But without that, isn’t it difficult to justify having the programs in the first place?  

Unless employers want to simply check off the wellness box and call it a day, it’s critically important to the success of your programs – and to your overall employee health strategy – to evaluate and measure their performance.  How else will you know if your programs are working? How will you identify areas for improvement and make informed decisions about future investments in health and wellness? And let’s not forget about justifying your current investments. Your exec team will probably want to know what your organization is getting for the money.

So show them. Choose programs which provide real-time reports based on validated performance and health data.  Real-time, on demand reports which are available when you want them – not when your vendor conducts an annual review meeting.  Full of validated data, collected by devices such as activity trackers and biometrics measurement stations – not manually entered by employees.  These key components will allow you to easily and accurately measure real results and program impact.  Not only that, if you use an integrated solution for your incentives programs, the reports can provide information about how your employees are engaging in all of the programs you offer, making them much easier to manage.

And seeing program performance in real-time allows you to optimize as you go.  It’s much more effective to make small adjustments to your programs throughout their lifecycle rather than wait and make big changes once a year. Be proactive in program optimization with real-time information, rather than taking a retroactive look at what you could have done to make your programs more effective. This way, you can get much more out of your investments, and better adapt to your changing business needs.