TITLE

Workplace Wellness Lab delivers leading insights, ideas and information on wellness, health management, and healthy living.

Our goal is simple: Workplace Wellness Lab provides regular and better information as an important path to create healthy individual outcomes, while helping change health care in America.

By connecting the audiences that matter – consultants, corporate executives, policymakers, thought leaders, journalists, customers, and more – we establish a positive, substantive, and influential voice within the wellness industry that makes the case that:

    • Left unchecked, current trends in health spend and outcomes are unsustainable.
    • Given that half the healthcare dollars in this country are incurred by employers, well-executed preventive care health management programs in the worksite are clearly enduring and valuable, helping drive improved workplace environments and individual outcomes.
    • Industry coherence around private sector innovation to drive effective health management programs is economically vital, given what’s possible in a spend category that is arguably one of the greatest challenges in America today.

Workplace Wellness Lab comes at this challenge principally from the employer point of view: What are the credible and demonstrated best practices in preventive care to structure programs that have an enduring impact? How can the impact be made explicit, as something that is both the right thing to do and a proactive business initiative that lowers the cost of care, as experienced by both employers and employees?

And Workplace Wellness Lab goes beyond the workplace. It’s a robust platform filled with ideas and insights from those that influence how employers think about this opportunity: research organizations, non-profits, think tanks and more.

From an editorial point of view, great ideas can come from anywhere. With that philosophy in mind, we will combine our own original content with other content across the web. We organize the content, with a view to making it as simple and useful as possible.

All content will be sourced. If we found it somewhere, we’ll tell you where we got — and how to get to that site yourself.

We also welcome your comments — criticisms, ideas, and, yes, we take compliments, too! Have a thought of what you’d like to see — or see something you think others should know — drop us a line.

Thanks for visiting – and please come back again!

Transparency is extremely important to us, so we are letting you know that we may receive a commission on some of links you click on from this page. See our disclaimer.


Data privacy remains a key concern — and important skill — around any workplace wellness program. Today more than ever, companies must not only maintain strict privacy in fact, but also in spirit — through communications and more.

At the same time, a proper use of data can provide employees all kinds of insights — and can help companies consider proper plan design.

But as HealthMine notes, “A recent survey from Fitbit showed that while most companies have wellness programs, they struggle to use the data the programs generate.” Indeed, according to a Mobihealth News story on the same survey, “about 28 percent of the CEOs surveyed said it is hard to keep track of the data.”

Further, HealthMine noted that it has found similar results: “An October 2015 HealthMine survey of insured consumers revealed that 38 percent are confused about what their lifestyle/behavioral health data means, and only 42 percent know what actions they need to take after looking at this data.”

One potential negative to ignoring useful data: Companies may be slow to make important improvements to their wellness programs and, for that matter, health plans.

In reviewing the Fitbit data, the Mobihealth pieces notes: “Less than half of the CEOs surveyed, about 44 percent, said they made changes to their wellness program within the last year. Meanwhile, 28 percent said they made changes to their wellness program one to two years ago and 23 percent said they made changes to their program three to five years ago.”

As HealthMine concludes: “Until we close the health data knowledge gap, the promise of wellness programs, digital health tools, and providers with ready access to electronic medical records will remain unfulfilled.”

 

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This