Steering the Conversation: A Wellness Success Story

During a recent address to a group of benefits professionals, Jennifer Benz, founder and CEO of benefits communication firm Benz Communications, charged her listeners with steering the national conversation about benefits.  The world hears a distorted view of what’s really going on in the benefits trenches.  The news reports the negative side of our industry:  the cost increases, the patient whose prescription isn’t covered, and failed wellness programs.  She said that benefits managers have the power to change the national conversation about employee benefits for the good by sharing the success stories.  Here is mine.

Matt Rogan* has been working in our company for eight years.  He has climbed his way up the corporate ladder and now manages a large department.  He is a cheery 32 years old, married and has four children.  In his spare time he volunteers for a local volunteer Emergency Medical Service Organization.  One more thing about Matt: Matt is a big guy.  A really big guy.  

In October 2013, our company hosted its first biometric health screening event for employees.  Anyone who completed the screening, regardless of results would pay a discounted rate for his or her health insurance premiums.

Matt was told at the screening that he needed to see a doctor about his elevated glucose levels and BMI.  He went to his doctor who welcomed him into the type 2 diabetes club.  He was put on anti diabetes drug Metformin and was told he needed to start losing weight, eating better, and exercising.

Last week I ran into Matt but I had to do a double take.  I barely recognized the Matt from just six months ago because he had lost 100 pounds.   He thanked me profusely and said that the health screening was his wake up call and inspiration to start leading a healthy lifestyle.  He had changed his eating habits and exercises every day and is now off of his medication.  Even during the never ending winter that we had he was able to get in his exercise by walking up and down the 18 flights of stairs in our building a few times each day.

There is a saying in the Talmud:  Whoever saves one life is as if he saves the entire world.  Wellness programs are not perfect and if you get down to the raw data the numbers will tell you that they don’t make financial sense.  But it’s the real human stories that sometimes make a stronger impact. There are a lot of Matts out there that have HR departments renewing their Wellness contracts.  The world just needs to know about them.

*Name changed to protect privacy

5 Things that won't stay in Vegas

I recently had the privilege of attending the Human Resource Executive Health and Benefits Leadership Conference in Las Vegas.  The event was well run, the speakers were (for the most part) terrific, and the session topics relevant.

Here are five things I learned:

1.        A representative from Intuit, the massive software company, spoke about its wellness program.  The speaker walked us through the seven years the company has been working on the wellness program and the various initiatives and incentives it has introduced.  In the end she admitted that she could NOT produce an ROI on the medical costs despite the constant tweaking and incentives.  She said Intuit will continue with a wellness program because it fits the company culture and employees appreciate it.

2.       Jim Klein from the American Benefits council once again predicted (I heard him give the same prediction two years ago) that COBRA will either end or change.  Essentially he argued that with the option of the public exchanges, there is no need for COBRA, as former employees now have access to coverage (probably with subsidies).  I hope he’s right.

3.       A popular rating agency isn’t just reviewing cars and washing machines, as they have now expanded into the health care ratings industry.  The newly created division, called Healthy Living, now reviews and ranks doctors, hospitals, health insurance plans, medications, and even medical procedures.  They’ve also partnered with the National Business Coalition on Health to create an employer toolkit called Choosing Wisely, which contains a wealth of resources employers can use to help communicate their health plan.

4.       Three of the major players in the health care cost transparency market came together for a panel discussion.  While it turned into a bit of game where each vendor wanted to show how much better its product was than its competitors, what was clear to me was that this is a product that is going to be offered in more and more health plans.  We’ve been ratcheting up deductibles and telling employees to be better consumers of health care.  Now we finally have a tool that they can use to help them make those decisions.

5.       Something that I’ve been working on in my Benefits department was hammered home when Adobe and Benz communication spoke together about using good design to communicate benefits.  The slide that got people taking pictures of the screen simply said: Good design helps people make good decisions’.  And it’s so true.  I’ve recently collaborated with our advertising team to help make our emails look nicer.  The feedback was great and the response to the emails has been huge.

The Dreaded Email from HR

Let’s face it: Employees dread getting emails from the HR department.  Many employees have told me that they simply ignore emails from HR or have them set up to go straight to the SPAM folder.  That’s because the emails are usually dry and boring and are about new rules, clarification of existing rules, or in general bad news. I don’t blame employees for not wanting to read them.  The problem is that every once in a while you really do have something important to say and you’ve lost your audience.

I decided that I needed to do something fun, different and unexpected in an attempt to get employees to change their views and hopefully get them to start paying attention.  An idea came to me when I was reading the list that the Social Security Administration publishes containing the most popular baby names for that year.  Many news outlets pick up the story and report about the biggest movers and speculate why certain names become more or less popular than they have previously been.

I decided to do the same thing with the names of babies born to employees at my company.  I ran a report of all the names of babies born to employees that year and ranked them by popularity.  Then I compared them to the national data.  This didn’t take long at all and I put together a cute email blast to the company with the results.

The feedback was overall positive.  Many employees loved the idea and thanked me for doing something fun and unconventional.  A handful of emails were negative (“is this what you do all day?”) but overall I accomplished my goal.  The trick is coming up with interesting topics to send out every once in a while to keep the momentum and to ensure that employees are opening the important emails as well.

CVS Caremark Smoke Out

CVS Caremark Pharmacy has been getting a lot of attention for its recent decision to stop selling tobacco products in its stores.  The CEO essentially said that selling tobacco products didn’t make sense for a company in the health business.  CVS Caremark has received praise from health advocates nationwide and even President Obama issued a statement applauding the company.

While the story sounds nice, I’m a little skeptical as to its true motives here.  The profit margins on cigarettes are slim (14.6% in 2011) and have been slowly decreasing over the years.  Even 7-11 has recently said that it expects cigarette sales to decline and that it doesn’t see tobacco products as being part of its long-term business model.  So perhaps CVS took the opportunity to capitalize on what was just a smart business move.  Removing part of a business that is not as profitable as other parts just makes sense.

If it were truly serious about making sure that CVS Caremark was a health store, wouldn’t it eliminate its soda and junk food aisle?  Well that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon because the profits margins on food items are 55%.  I’m curious to see if others will follow suit in the name of health.

HR and Benefits folks should take note.  If you communicate a wellness program that claims you care about the health of your employees but don’t get rid of the junk food in the vending machine, your employees will call you out for being hypocritical.

The Doctors are really into Telemedicine

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece this week about a new telemedicine startup called Doctor on Demand, that was featured on a recent episode of the TV talk show Dr. Phil.  It turns out that Dr. Phil’s son, who is the executive producer of the talk show “The Doctors” is one of the founders of Doctors on Demand and Dr. Phil himself is one of its major investors.  Repeat after me: conflict of interest.

My company jumped on the telemedicine bandwagon a few years ago and has been using a company called MDLive as our telemedicine provider.  Utilization has been lower than we had anticipated but we do see a place for it in the benefits package.  Employees have been using the service for ailments such as eye infections and asthma, as well as for mental health issues like anxiety and depression. 

As the competition in this space has grown, MDLive has signed on Dr. Travis Stork as their celebrity spokesperson.  Dr. Stork may be best known as the bachelor on season 8 of the TV show “The Bachelor,” but is also one of the doctors on the TV show “The Doctors."  Are you following?

So the executive producer of "The Doctors" started a telemedicine company and one of the stars of his show signed on to represent his competition.  “The Doctors” has a segment on the show where they showcase the Doctor on Demand app (again, conflict of interest).  I wonder how the folks at MDLive feel about their spokesperson using the competition on his talk show.